8 Mission’s End, 1898–1906

Old and New

The Aged

Bluff was “a good country for the aged,” proclaimed Francis Hammond in his latest dispatch to the Deseret News in January 1898.¹ Jens Nielson and his wives, along with the Hammonds, Adams, and Allans, were about to experience how kind the country would be to the elderly. The bishop and his families were finally fully settled, with the completion of “quite a commodious rock house” for Kirsten.² With all her children grown, Kirsten was often alone in her comfortable new quarters. Some of her offspring lived with her at times, and those who were in town visited her often as the grandchildren scurried about. Jens continued to reside with Elsie in the brick home the next lot over, to satisfy the requirements of the Manifesto. He would usually cut through the gardens and trees to Kirsten’s home to eat dinner, the mid-day meal. The red bandanna in his pocket was his napkin, and it matched the red checked tablecloth Kirsten usually set. If it was a particularly good day, Kirsten might have made dumplings. After a leisurely meal, Jens would usually chat with Kirsten for a while before returning to the fields or the tithing ^[363] yard. The bishop still worked as hard as his health allowed, stumping south to his fields early in the morning, pondering the questions of the day in the cool air, but he made the trip less frequently with time.³

As always, he was full of advice, practical and spiritual, for the members of his town and ward. “Brother Adams, your alfalfa is too ripe. You need to cut it right away,” or “Brother Perkins, you’d better mend your ditch.”⁴ Sometimes he would be blunt. When one brother tried to explain to the bishop what he wanted to do in a certain matter, Jens replied, “I don’t care what you want to do. I want you to do it this way.”⁵ Some of this was confidence in his own judgment, but it was mixed with great concern for the welfare of those in his ward. Sarah Perkins remembered, “He advised and directed us and knew our affairs as well as we knew them ourselves.”⁶ When in 1899 Adelia Lyman’s ninety-three-year-old mother fell ill in Fillmore, the family summoned Sister Lyman to come and see her mother one more time. She was not sure if she would make it in time, so she asked Bishop Nielson for his advice. He didn’t know immediately, but promised to tell her before she started out early the next morning. When the time came, the bishop told her not to go. “You will not see your mother,” he told her. “She will be dead before you get there, and your long trip will be in vain.” Sister Lyman stayed and the bishop’s ^[364] prediction turned out to be correct.⁷

Kirsten and Elsie also kept as busy as they could. Kirsten was still the president of the ward Relief Society, and Elsie was the treasurer. The members of the organization continued to take care of each other through their compassion and frequent visits. They collected cloth to make sheets, quilts, and pillows and some of their funds went to the poor among them. They also saved to build a Relief Society hall with the members’ small contributions as well as from the revenue generated by their sheep herd, which was on consignment with Lemuel Redd (paying them $21.20 in the year 1900).⁸ Elsie still tended her beehives. Her children and grandchildren helped turn the extractor and pack the honey into the five-gallon cans Elsie distributed throughout the family and the community.⁹

Bluff was still far away from the railroad, but the world continued to get smaller. People in Bluff could order all sorts of items, from books to guns to stomach pumps, from Montgomery Ward. Newspapers came with the mail three times a week and, with their “telegraphic dispatch,” continued to make “the whole world a kind of a neighbor.”¹⁰ Jens often discussed world events as he and others waited for the rider to come to the post ^[365] office on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evenings.¹¹ He might also find other people, particularly Francis Hammond, John Allan, and William Adams, at the co-op or Adams’s stores and opine on the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in February, the government’s declaration of war with Spain in April, or the General Authorities’ advice to show patriotism by helping with the war effort. Local boy Henry Wood answered the call and packed supply mules toward Santiago, Cuba, later in the year.¹² The town was proud of his performance, as well as that of the country, which showed itself to be “one of the first class nations of the earth in every particular.”¹³

While American imperial power swelled during 1898, politics continued to diminish Bluff’s position in the county. The Gentiles’ hold on county offices didn’t last long, as they lost control of most posts in 1897 and 1898. The Bluff Mormons helped elect Lemuel Redd as representative to the Utah Legislature in 1898 and again in 1900. But Monticello kept its suzerainty over San Juan County. When the county elected its first female official, Kate Perkins, as clerk in 1898, her victory was almost entirely due to the northern influence, which supported her 113-80. Those in Bluff futilely backed their man, Peter Allan, by a margin of 41-10.¹⁴

The broader world continued to come to Bluff a visitor or two at a time, as ^[366] miners, oil prospectors, or relic hunters.¹⁵ May 1898 brought one of the most exotic: a man named Sidhi Mahomet Taciber arrived with his traveling companion, a Miss Peabody. He presented a letter to the bishop from President Hammond, whom he had met in Colorado, explaining his past and why he was in Bluff. He had been born to English parents in India but then orphaned and educated in Indian schools. He came to the county to study the ethnography of the ancient Indians, and Charles Goodman helped him excavate extensive ruins just north of Bluff and others in Comb Wash. The visitor stopped into town from time to time over the summer and gave lectures on India. The Bluff congregation was curious about and courteous to his philosophy and took up a collection for him when he left for Salt Lake City in September.¹⁶

The land showed its age as well. The settlers had stripped nearby banks of their cottonwoods and by 1898 foraging for wood meant a major expedition, sometimes occupying a whole day. If they were lucky, they might find some driftwood in Cottonwood Wash; otherwise, they had to travel increasing distances to find any trees. This was not only an inconvenience for the settlers, but an invitation to the rivers to wander more than they previously had. The San Juan banks had eroded more in the years since the settlers arrived than they had in the previous centuries.¹⁷ The river meandered from bank to bank in 1898, and it continued to eat away at the bishop’s hay field and ^[367] other acres of farms south of town. But there was one good sign early in the year. U.S. government surveyors were finally starting to officially measure the land, even if there was less of it to measure. At long last Bluff settlers started preparing their applications for the land that most of them had been living on for almost twenty years.¹⁸

Temporal Affairs

On the whole, Bluff’s spirits stayed high in early 1898. There was a brief flash when some thought oil discoveries downriver would go far in “redeeming that section from the scorn with which many would-be wits and real ignoramuses have spoken of it,” but the boom collapsed quickly.¹⁹ Bluff’s men decided to try something new on the ditch: this would be the year of the pump. The jump was the only section upriver where the San Juan hadn’t left its northern bank, so along the site of the old cribs the townspeople tried their technology. A man named Morris Posthelwaite, known to everyone as “Posty,” came to engineer the pump. A few wagons brought the contraption to town in late January to great acclaim, and by early March the steam engine was chugging along, to the delight of the children who went out to take a look. But by mid-March it was obvious the thing was not working: the boiler was too small. France Nielson helped haul in a larger one at the end of April, but when the first of June came, the expectant town still had not celebrated the first trickle in the ditch. It turned out the muddy waters of the San Juan were as hard on the large boiler as they had been on the small. ^[368] When the river went down in late July, the experiment was abandoned. The year of the pump turned into another year of measly yields: some orchard fruits, but very few vegetables, and only half a crop of hay. At least the pump failed convincingly enough to persuade them not to try it again. The next year the laborers unleashed their full traditional arsenal: digging, scraping, cribbing, riprapping, and damming the river, without much more success.²⁰ Reports from New Mexico that there were five thousand acres of unsettled land that could be irrigated for $1.50 an acre only galled them further.²¹

The range was in better shape. France Nielson was still the foreman of the pool in 1898. Heavy snows in the winter of 1897–98 had forced the cattle down to lower levels and made it easier for enterprising cowboys such as Al Scorup to round up the strays. The pool and other cattlemen gained more stock this way than they lost to the continued operations of horse thieves and cattle rustlers, some of whom operated out of the notorious Robbers’ Roost in Emery County. Bluff residents continued to appeal to the government for help. Governor Wells put out rewards for the outlaws, but they would take time to be effective.²²

The co-op board of directors decided that their store should look as nice as the new homes in town, so they authorized building a larger stone structure with a dance hall on the second floor. And after so many years, a gristmill was coming to the county, but ^[369] to Monticello, not Bluff. A few Bluff men who also farmed in Monticello, such as Hans Bayles and Joseph Barton, invested in the project. Hopefully this would bring down the price of the imported flour on which Bluff always depended. It was hard on Bluff residents that they now also had to depend on outside hay for the winter or let their domestic animals forage. But overall the heavy snows made for a fine year for cattle. Francis Nielson increased the pool’s stock by buying over sixteen hundred head late in the season even though prices were high. Francis Hammond dubbed it the “most prosperous season for cattle and sheep” since he came.²³ Although the pump failed, their stock continued to sustain them.

But prosperity was no proof of unity. In fact, it might have made cooperation more difficult. The Bluff Cattle Pool broke apart at the end of the year. The cold snap in early December 1898 might have been the last straw. Temperatures hit fourteen below zero, and though Bluff’s children were delighted at the chance to skate or slide on the frozen San Juan or play in almost a foot of snow, the intense cold killed some cattle and convinced many of the pool’s participants that they could care for their herds better themselves. But in larger terms, the outside pressure from competing cattle companies, which was a major reason the pool was formed in the first place, had diminished. The Pittsburgh Cattle Company was the last big “outside” outfit left, but it operated far to the north, and it was getting smaller. Fewer outside herds invaded Bluff’s ranges during the winter. Without these threats to Bluff’s stock raisers, men who once had cooperated for the common good now went their ^[370] separate ways. Many sold their cattle to the Scorup brothers.²⁴ The Nielson brothers continued to operate the family’s interest and also ran some of their sheep together with the increasing flocks of Lemuel Redd. Individual ranchers began to fence their own pastures on Elk Mountain.²⁵ All continued to support cooperation as a principle, but their practices were fraying from that ideal.²⁶

As competition continued to replace cooperation, Bluff stockmen employed more Mexican herders to watch over their stock. A few worked as herdsmen, tending twenty-five hundred to three thousand head apiece for eight to ten months before returning home to spend a few months with their families in the winter. As many as fifty would converge on the large sheep camps during the spring and fall shearings.²⁷ These migratory laborers had been used since at least 1890 and usually remained anonymous to Bluff’s residents, who hired “a Mexican” just as they hired “an Indian.” Not only did these herders have experience with stock, they could be hired for less, generally getting twenty-five dollars a month, instead of the thirty dollars paid to boys or men from Bluff.²⁸ Sometimes D. J. Rogers would teach the deacons a lesson in “Mexican,” and some boys picked up enough of the language to allow them to converse basically. ^[371] Every once in a while, especially among the younger generation in Bluff, a laborer would distinguish himself by name. Albert Lyman became good friends with a young worker named Jose Aragon and later traveled to New Mexico to meet his family.²⁹ Lemuel Redd developed close relationships with some of his herders.³⁰ But more often these workers were noted only for their tragedies, such as the poor man who fell off a heavy wagon and was crushed to death by its wheels. Bluff held a funeral for the man, but did not know his name or where he lived. Writing of him, Albert Lyman lamented on the lonely life of these workers: “He says he (I should say said) had a grown up family. I feel sorry to think they do not know where their father is tonight.”³¹

Drought returned in 1899 and continued through the next year. The San Juan actually dried into puddles in the summer of 1900, a sight those at Bluff had never seen before.³² While it was a novelty to cross the river dry-shod and it was easy to pull fish out of the pools, the drought once again brought serious consequences to the county. Bluff didn’t raise any grain in 1899 or 1900. Stock continued to suffer on the range, but did well enough to allow the town to survive. Once again though, Bluff looked good by comparison. The drought seriously hurt the crops in Monticello as well, forcing people there to look for outside work. Church leaders now had to counsel the Saints in ^[372] Monticello, much as they had done in Bluff in its early years, not to move about without consent from their Church leaders. The downturn caused the owners of the new gristmill to be in danger of defaulting. Bluff’s livestock allowed its owners to raise the three thousand dollars needed to keep the mill.³³ Bluff’s cattlemen were fortunate in other ways: none of them, despite countless close calls, had been seriously injured or killed on the range. Bert Stevens came closest in 1901, sleeping through a stampede that would have trampled him if the panicked cattle had fled down the gulch instead of up.³⁴

The drought increased another problem that already existed. Since at least 1895, the county had perpetually been on the brink of bankruptcy. Roads were still the greatest expense, and many Bluff men who planned on spending a day as they wanted were collared by the road supervisor to work off their road tax instead. When the Gentiles took over county government in 1896, they lowered property and liquor taxes dramatically and increased expenditures, making the deficit worse. By 1897, some spoke of annexing the almost insolvent county to Grand County, which was understandably reluctant to absorb San Juan’s debt.³⁵ When Mormons, albeit mostly Monticellans, took back most county offices in the following years, they had no solutions either, and petitions for annexation were sent to the Utah Legislature again in 1899 and 1901, failing both times to win a ^[373] majority in each county.³⁶ San Juan County’s government continued to drag along as well as it could until better times returned.

Bluff hung on as well. The completion of the two-story, rock co-op store symbolized how its trade and livestock kept them afloat. But by the time the physical co-op building was finished, the principle of cooperation was practiced less in Bluff than ever before. Bishop Nielson and President Hammond continued to preach the principle, sometimes in sharp terms, condemning the “lack of faith by failing to carry out counsel given us in our temporal matters. Cooperation seems to be lost sight of by many of us.”³⁷ But besides these admonitions, there were no new cooperative ventures. Bluff was not alone in abandoning the practice of these principles. As Bluff stockmen were losing their distinctive cooperative organizations, Utah as a whole was becoming more like the Gentiles in financial matters.

Other long-time residents followed Kumen Jones and the bishop’s lead in building substantial homes. Joe Nielson joined Lem Redd, Hans Bayles (no longer a widower, having recently wed Eva Lyman, Albert’s older sister), and James Decker in putting down foundations for homes in 1898 and 1899.³⁸ But some were also pulling them up. Francis Hammond, who emerged from debt in 1897 and prospered during the boom year of 1898, left his stone cottage on “Vinegar Hill” and moved to Moab in 1899, after obtaining permission from Church leaders. Although Moab was still a town of three ^[374] whiskey saloons, two blacksmith shops, a large dance hall, and one small Mormon church, President Hammond felt it was a better place for him to be as he approached his eighties.³⁹ He could continue his exhausting quarterly tours of the stake but would also be closer to the railroad at Thompson’s Springs for his frequent visits to Salt Lake City and Ogden. His son Fletcher was already in Moab, and he and his large family would be a comfort to President Hammond and his wife in their older years. At his farewell party in Bluff, the ward gave him twenty-one dollars, which they said he should use to buy an easy chair in which to rest his old bones.⁴⁰ President Hammond and Bishop Nielson said their farewells on mutually good terms, despite their past differences.⁴¹

Spiritual Matters

Missionaries

Bishop Nielson declared in early 1899 that he “never heard bad counsel” from his Church leaders, a remarkable declaration given what he had been through as a result of that counsel.⁴² The young men were still known to disregard that counsel, however, and make “asses of themselves” when they found the saloons in Durango at the end of their cattle drives. Sometimes they didn’t have to go that far, as at the reception in honor of Henry Wood’s return from the Spanish-American War, where “most of the boys were ^[375] intoxicated, and the doings wound up with an attempt at murder.”⁴³ The effort to reform “our careless young men” was accelerated in 1898 and 1899 with a wave of home missionaries, Joe Nielson being one of them, called to travel around the stake, paying particular attention to teaching the young men in the wards.⁴⁴ “Never in the history of our stake,” exclaimed Lemuel Redd, “has there been as much union and interest in attending the meetings of the different organizations. Many who have laid dormant for years are waking up and showing signs of life.”⁴⁵ At an evening meeting soon after the fracas at the Wood reception, old William Adams spoke in tongues, prophesying, upon translation from the thrilling and strange language, that soon a large number of young men from Bluff would be called on missions.⁴⁶ The trend, in fact, had already started.

In early 1898, Church authorities had requested stake presidents to submit as many names as they could for missionary service.⁴⁷ President Hammond had probably done so, but the next missionary called from Bluff surprised even him. Platte Lyman received a letter on October 5 from P.O. Box B in Salt Lake City, the address of the First Presidency of the Church. Lorenzo Snow had just been sustained to succeed Wilford Woodruff as the prophet. Platte Lyman had been called to become the ^[376] president of the Church’s European Mission. It was astounding to Platte Lyman himself and to the whole town, and they took it as a collective compliment that someone from their remote location would be asked to assume such great responsibilities. To President Lyman personally it meant vindication for the years since 1884 when he had felt outside the confidence of the Church authorities. But this mission would be difficult for his family, since he had just inched out of debt in 1898. The bishop loaned him some money for his expenses to Europe and on Tuesday, October 18, 1898, the Bluff Ward threw a party for the departing dignitary. At the end of the program, Elder Lyman “made a speech that brought tears to many eyes,” and two days later he left.⁴⁸

Within a week, Wayne Redd returned from his diligent service in the Southern States Mission. Caroline was, of course, ecstatic to have her husband home, and the rest of the ward was again impressed with what a difference a mission had made on a man. Scarcely a month after he returned, Elder Redd was called to fill Platte Lyman’s place as a counselor to Stake President Hammond.

In that cold December of 1898, soon after the “holiday amusements began in dead earnest,” another letter came from Box B. France Nielson was holding a dinner with Wayne Redd and other recently called or returned missionaries when they were interrupted by France’s little boy Lisle, who came in with the letter. France had been called to the Southern States Mission, where Wayne had just served. Before Francis left in April, Jens Peter, Uriah, and seven other young men from Bluff were “endorsed as missionaries,” in some cases to their great surprise, in the Bluff Stake Conference in ^[377] February. Albert Lyman was among them; he was to join his father in London. Most of the others, including the Nielson boys, were called to the Southern States Mission along with Francis. They were typical of the many different types of missionaries Church leaders had called at the time: Jens Peter was, besides Peter Allan, the town’s most recalcitrant bachelor at age thirty-seven; France, at thirty, left his wife with three small children; Uriah was twenty-two and attending Brigham Young Academy when he heard the news.

The next months saw a string of missionary preparation classes, parties, collections, and farewells for the departing proselytizers. Francis left in April, Jens Peter and Uriah in October. The letters they wrote home reminded those in Bluff how much faith was required of missionaries traveling without purse or scrip, especially in the southern United States. Mobbing was increasing in the wake of the B. H. Roberts hearings in Congress. Roberts had been elected to the House of Representatives from Utah but was accused of being unfit since he still had more than one wife. Eventually he was refused his seat, and widespread suspicions that Mormons were still practicing polygamy were taken out on the Church’s representatives. Two missionaries from the San Juan Stake had been beaten in Tennessee already in 1899.⁴⁹ So the Nielson boys knew what might be coming.

Families and friends in Bluff followed the missionaries’ reports eagerly. The trip to the mission was fascinating if they had never traveled to Omaha or Chicago to sell stock before. The immense cornfields on the Great Plains were astonishing, while the ^[378] enormous grain elevators and massive factories in Kansas City and St. Louis were at least as impressive. Somewhere along the line the greenhorn missionaries bought a new suit or two and sent their old clothes home.

Once they arrived at their field of labor, which was usually rural, they found a new brand of hard work. They got blisters the first week, often walking over ten miles a day through dust or mud and usually over two hundred miles in a month. San Juan men were used to roads like these but not the walking; in Bluff they had horses to cover such distances. And there were other unfamiliar things: “prickly heat, seed ticks, and red bugs” among them.⁵⁰ At times the missionaries bathed themselves and washed their clothes in secluded creeks and ponds. The people they encountered were sometimes even more rural than they were: “These are good, piney woods people. They do not know their ages, and all chew tobacco,” including a girl who might have been six.⁵¹ If the missionaries couldn’t get dinner, they walked through the afternoon on empty stomachs, unless they happened on some berries. And it was often discouraging as they tramped late into the night, through many refusals, until someone would give them “entertainment”: food and shelter for the evening. They came to appreciate quickly and keenly the luxuries of a good bed and filling food. They didn’t travel on Sunday, so every week they had to find someone willing to give them two nights’ entertainment. The sweetest words in the world were those some people used to invite them back for another ^[379] night’s lodging if they ever wanted it.

It was a sobering and sometimes intimidating experience as each missionary bore his testimony for the first time in front of strangers, especially when some of the listeners were “old, hard-shelled Baptists” who had strong beliefs and traditions of their own.⁵² The Mormon preachers gave away thousands of tracts and held hundreds of “gospel conversations” and scores of meetings, but they sold few books and were fortunate if they found people willing to take them seriously for very long. Every so often a letter from home would find them in their wanderings, and sometimes these had contributions in cash or in the prized commodities of envelopes and stamps. It was unusual to see so many Black Americans. In some parts of the mission, the missionaries were marching through the country “visiting the white people which were scattered amongst the Negroes.”⁵³ Even if the missionaries didn’t baptize a single soul, their experiences made them think about their own beliefs and their home in Bluff.

All of these missionaries gave old Bishop Nielson much more to do. He had more duties as the father of his family now that three of his sons were gone at once. Joe would also have to carry more of the load of the family’s enterprises, and his oldest sons, Eddie and Jens Lyman, were just old enough at fourteen and thirteen to be of some use. The bishop also had more to do looking after the families of the other seven missionaries who went out with his sons. Monroe Redd left behind a wife and six children. The Redds were having a particularly hard time doing without their husband and father and were ^[380] about to call him home. The bishop visited them and told them what to do to keep Monroe in the field. They did it, and he stayed out until he finished his mission.⁵⁴ Sometimes good news came from afar. When President Lyman visited Denmark, he wrote Bishop Nielson about it, and Jens enthusiastically replied.

The people of Bluff were still on their own mission, though its goals slowly changed. In recent years Bluff sent few missionaries to the Indians to convert them either to agriculture or Mormonism. C. L. Christensen, their most experienced Indian missionary, relocated to Monticello over the objections of Bishop Nielson in 1897. The attitudes of many in the town became more frustrated and impatient, especially toward the Utes and Paiutes. Francis Hammond felt as early as 1896 that “the seventy-five or a hundred renegades with which they had been afflicted for years” should be “given a small reservation of their own or be settled by the government,” since “the settlers had cared for them about long enough.”⁵⁵ Now, Bluff residents and Church authorities seemed satisfied to maintain peace and encourage trade and friendship without looking for anything more. A Navajo fair was held in Bluff on September 21, 1899, for these exact purposes.⁵⁶

For the first time, the San Juan Mission had competition for Indian converts. Howard and Evelyn Antes, Methodist missionaries, moved in twenty-five miles upriver from Bluff to a place they named “Aneth” after the Hebrew word for “answer.” In 1899 they opened a school to educate Navajos from their “heathen superstition.” The Antes couple considered the reservation a “cesspool of ignorance and superstition and immorality.” Bluff’s residents had little to do with the Antes effort, though it may have been a painful ^[381] reminder of what they once aspired to do.⁵⁷

Howard Antes also assumed the role of advocate for the Navajos, and one of the groups he felt he needed to protect them from was the Mormons. He was not worried as much about theology as about land rights. Navajo herders had brought their flocks off the reservation to the land east of Bluff more often in the past few years. The drought had been hard for them, and they sought better pasture for their herds. But Bluff needed that range as well and allowing the Navajos to use it “would starve out our people.”⁵⁸ Bluff’s stockmen considered this a violation of their traditional boundary along the San Juan and aggressively negotiated to keep the Navajos south of the river. Antes, however, was able to win concessions from federal officials for the Navajos to graze their herds north of the San Juan. He then assumed the power, reminiscent of Henry Mitchell, to write passes for Navajos wishing to do so.⁵⁹ Bluff’s stockmen felt the pinch, and Bluff’s residents might have felt the sting of being the rivals of a people they had worked so long to befriend.

Tithing

If the Mormons in Bluff could not make much headway in their original mission to their Indian neighbors, they could be satisfied with their ward’s record in comparison with that of other Church units. The Bluff Ward continued to sponsor the full program of the ^[382] Church despite its limited numbers. Its members took great pride in having sent out so many missionaries, even though this caused hardship at home. As friends and neighbors helped out, the sacrifice was shared by the community and so was the sense of achievement. In this informal way, the cooperative principle endured. Bluff Ward members diligently sought to have a good record in other areas. When a Brother Lambert came to town in early 1900 “in the interest of the Deseret News,” he had little work to do, since everyone already subscribed to that paper and the Juvenile Instructor as well, and almost everyone took the Improvement Era.⁶⁰

Bishop Nielson and his ward also did their best to help the Church out of its financial difficulties. By 1898, Church headquarters found itself $2.3 million in debt, with less than $1 million in tithing coming in per year.⁶¹ President Wilford Woodruff was disappointed in his desire to retire the debt during his life, and when Lorenzo Snow succeeded him in 1898, the new president felt the same urgency. George Q. Cannon wrote to his old friend “Frank” Hammond, “There should be a disposition shown by every member of the church, and especially by the officers of the church, to do all in their power to reduce expenses and help clear off the load of indebtedness.”⁶² The First Presidency urged bishops to care for the tithing items as well as possible: “Nothing should be allowed to waste or decay for lack of care and attention.” They should also ^[383] send in tithing cash at least monthly and liquidate whatever they could.⁶³ As had been the practice for years, bishops were entitled to 6 to 7 percent of the ward’s tithes in return for their efforts, and stake clerks 3 or 4 percent.⁶⁴ In May 1899, after receiving a revelation on the subject while visiting St. George, President Snow felt that he must teach the principle of tithing more powerfully to the Church. A solemn assembly in Salt Lake City in July 1899 impressed on the leaders that the principle of tithing had to be from henceforth “faithfully and fully kept.”⁶⁵

Bluff also did well in this crusade. Its members had paid a full tithing for some years already, even during the difficulties of the drought and depression of the early 1890s.⁶⁶ Still, J. Golden Kimball was sent from Salt Lake City to the San Juan Stake in November 1899. “His special mission is to preach tithing,” Wayne Redd recorded, “but he hits us on all sides and speaks with a great deal of power.”⁶⁷ Both the visited and the visitor were impressed with each other. All who recorded their thoughts were struck by the force of Elder Kimball’s remarks, not only on tithing but on kindness toward the Indians and on the evils of round dancing and allowing Gentiles to dance with Mormon ^[384] girls.⁶⁸ Bluff gave Elder Kimball the full treatment, taking him up the river to the big cave and holding a social at Joe Nielson’s before he left. At this event they presented him with a collection of forty-two dollars to defray his expenses, a sum, according to the town’s schoolteacher, “that seems wonderful for such a little place.”⁶⁹ Elder Kimball was as impressed with the Saints in Bluff as Church Historian Andrew Jenson had been six years earlier, remarking that he had never visited a ward with less inequality or more kindness in all his travels among the Saints.⁷⁰ All together, as Kumen Jones later calculated, Bishop Nielson’s talents led his ward to establish “a record in church activities, as well as temporal affairs, that brought commendation of church authorities and surprise from friends of our little colony.”⁷¹ Of course the bishop had great amounts of help. Kumen Jones had been counseling him the whole time and Lemuel Redd for almost all of the time Nielson had been bishop. Jody Wood had been the Primary president for sixteen years in addition to her calling in the medical field.

Twenty Years at Bluff

As Bluff entered the year 1900 and its residents debated with some vigor which century they were in, they marked twenty years in San Juan County.⁷² The actual anniversary was celebrated with a “very pleasant” picnic social on April 6 and ^[385] commemorative speeches at church two days later.⁷³ The speakers and the occasion invited the citizens to reflect on what they had done and why they had done it.

They had survived, and as the years ticked by, this became an increasingly impressive accomplishment by itself. Their feelings toward their home were still mixed, however. At its best, Bluff could be idyllic, such as for Albert Lyman one day in the spring when he was courting his future wife: “Had a big sleep in the afternoon, and fixed our field for the water. The sky is somewhat cloudy tonight. Water still in the ditch. Everything is green. My cattle have all come back.”⁷⁴ At its worst, it was a purgatory: “Today I hauled manure, the wind blew, and it was a dismal day.”⁷⁵ But those who were at the celebrations had somehow endured everything so far.

In a way, Bluff had prospered. Its 193 residents were the same number as lived in Bluff and Montezuma combined back in 1880, but only three more than lived in Bluff in 1890. The mostly Mormon communities to the north also had significant numbers: Monticello had 161 occupants and Verdure had 32. Close to 60 percent of Bluff’s population was still under twenty years old, but everyone had moved up in the brackets. There were far more teenagers than toddlers now, and many more adults in their forties and fifties than before. The young couples in their twenties during the Hole-in-the-Rock trek, such as Kumen and Mary Jones, Lemuel and Eliza Redd, and Hyrum and Rachel Perkins, were now in their forties. The babies born back in 1880 were now seriously ^[386] considering marriage. Bishop Nielson had been there all along. He was still the oldest person in town, though the recent “Old Folks” dinner put Aggie Allan “just a little behind.”⁷⁶

By their own spiritual reckoning the citizens of Bluff had prospered more than their numbers indicated. As a stake clerk recalled toward the end of 1900, the few who remained after the floods of 1884 “commenced to prosper from that very time and have done exceedingly well ever since. Many of those who moved away were unsuccessful in their new endeavors to make homes and most of them are poor financially to this day (1900) while those who stayed on the San Juan with their children are well off at the present time and could buy out all those who went away twice over.”⁷⁷ While most had done well for themselves, they still had to justify their existence as a mission. Given the limits and frustrations they found in recent years in their politics and with the Indians, Bluff’s residents increasingly found justification for their mission in its effect on themselves and their children.

Bluff still had a distinctive identity, forged largely from what they lacked, as President Hammond wrote his nephew in 1899: “We have no doctor, no lawyer, no gambling houses, no poor that need support in our midst; we are free from such things as afflict most all communities.”⁷⁸ They had not converted many Indians, but they had converted some miners, and at the end of 1900 even the “infidel” and “avowed atheist” ^[387] Edward Thompson, a Scottish stonemason who had constructed many of their homes, was baptized.⁷⁹ Despite the town’s peaks and valleys, President Hammond declared in November that “this is the richest ward in the stake and a good people.”⁸⁰

By then the Nielson family had grown richer as well. Jens’s youngest daughter, Annetta, married the former miner, Ezekiel Johnson, on October 9, 1900. Nettie only measured up to Zeke’s shoulders, but, as he put it, that was high enough to reach his heart.⁸¹

Dark Times

There had been surprisingly few deaths in Bluff during the previous four years. That changed swiftly with the new century, and the daily labors of those in Bluff were again interrupted by tragedy. Aggie Allan died in April, but she was a respected woman who had lived a full life and died naturally. President Hammond’s departure was different. After his visit to Bluff in November 1900, his relentless schedule took him to a conference in Bloomfield, New Mexico. While pulling up to the home of a Church member, the top of President Hammond’s buggy hit a wire clothesline. The horses took fright, dashed forty feet, and overturned the buggy “with great force” against an adobe granary with a rock foundation. President Hammond was crushed against the hard stones. He remained unconscious for a day before he died. His funeral was held in Mancos, and his body was shipped back to Huntsville for burial. In Bluff, Bishop Nielson presided ^[388] over the ward’s memorial service “in honor of this sad affair” on December 2.⁸² The bishop and the stake president may have been too much alike in their vigorous personalities, and they collided with each other about Bluff and other issues, but each admired the other’s faith and good works. President Hammond had done his best to build up the mission under cooperative principles, and the mission would be much less without his character and contributions.

The bishop himself almost went next, succumbing to a severe “cold in the head.” At his age, despite his vigor, any illness was dangerous, and it caused a “sudden gloom” to fall over Bluff. Jens’s sickness continued into 1901, which “dawned upon us clear and cold.”⁸³ He gained strength through the next few weeks, and on January 27, 1901, he returned to Church with fervor. From the pulpit he assured doubters “he did not think our mission here in Bluff had been in vain; a great deal of good has been accomplished with the Lamanites and yet much is yet to be accomplished in the future.” Then “with much warmth” he predicted, “There are many of us who will live to see a temple built in this part of the land and administer the ordinances of the Lord’s house to many of the Lamanites.”^{84 [389]}

For the time being, however, Bluff’s woes continued. The entire town rallied in support of Lem Redd’s eleven-year-old son Charlie, stricken by pleurisy in his lungs. The Primary children fasted for him, the choir sang to him, and the bishop and elders administered to the endangered boy often. His parents finally took him to Salt Lake City, where Church authorities repeated the promises made to the boy in Bluff, and a surgeon tried to drain the infection. The town rejoiced together when the energetic lad returned home just after his twelfth birthday in May.⁸⁵

But smallpox came back to Bluff as well. The town was quarantined on the first day of summer, and the bishop suspended Church meetings for almost a month. Kirsten was stricken by the illness, and her daughter, Caroline Redd, was in mortal danger.⁸⁶ Jody and Sam Wood lost another child at an early age, their seven-year-old daughter Bernice, but the other families were spared.

France Nielson returned and reported his mission just before the outbreak. His presence began to relieve some of the burden on the bishop to care for his family. Platte Lyman also returned, called back from Europe to again assume the stake presidency, and the Saints welcomed him as well as they could in the middle of the quarantine. Soon after it was lifted, they threw him a party in the upper level of the co-op store and presented him with a check for $22.50 to help him get reestablished in Bluff.^{87 [390]}

President Lyman was not well, either. He hoped to build a more comfortable home for his wife, similar to the impressive structures that had appeared in his absence. But he couldn’t start on that yet. Soon after he was set apart as stake president on September 1, he and Adelia left for Salt Lake City. He had noticed an increasingly large and painful growth under his arm, and it needed to be removed.⁸⁸ While the Lymans were gone, William Adams’s failing health gave way. The Irish patriarch of two large families, who had lent his practical wisdom to both Bluff and Monticello over twenty years, died on September 30.

Platte Lyman returned in October, when “the wind [was] blowing sad and lonely as it does in the fall.”⁸⁹ Although surgeons had tried to remove the tumor, he was not cured. Once again, the town rallied its spiritual resources. The bishop declared a fast in late October, followed by a special priesthood meeting and blessing for President Lyman.⁹⁰ The doctor came from Cortez over the next few weeks but could do little to heal his patient or reduce his suffering.

More misfortune rained down on the stunned town. Caroline’s husband, Wayne Redd, suffered a serious accident. He was driving down the dugway near Dolores, Colorado, with a “four horse load,” when the brake lever broke. Wayne was caught by the rope tied across the front of the wagon and dragged close to eighty feet downhill; when he was found a few minutes later, he had a broken arm and a badly bruised head. Wayne ^[391] was flat on his back in Durango when Caroline got the news, and she rushed off see him at once.⁹¹ In all the history of Bluff, with all the traveling and freighting its residents did on uncertain roads, it was surprising that this sort of accident didn’t happen more often. Yet the timing of this wreck could not have been worse.

Platte Lyman’s agony became awful in his final days. His cries could be heard through much of the town; his family and neighbors were “horrified at his torture.” On November 13, the travail was so terrible that he requested that the bishop gather some elders to bless him for death. After this ordinance, Platte’s children and neighbors gathered about his bed for his final words. President Lyman, between groans, spoke to each person present and instructed all to “stay with the church and stand by each other. Listen to the advice of the bishop.” When Jens came in, Platte grasped his hand and told him, “Oh bishop, you have been a true father to me.”⁹² As night descended, the suffering man extended his arms and pleaded, “O pray the Lord to let me go!” Suddenly, the house swayed back and forth, rocked by an earthquake. Soon after, life finally slipped out of Platte Lyman. Jody Wood explained that “Brother Lyman is passing to the great beyond and the heavens are opening to receive him.”⁹³ Lucinda Redd felt that “the elements were taking part in his departure.”⁹⁴

The bishop and ward members helped the Lymans as well as they could. Albert ^[392] Lyman was left in charge of the family, and in the coming years he worked hard to build the house that his father could not. The Nielsons were cheered when Uriah and Jens Peter returned home in the weeks after President Lyman’s funeral. But little pure happiness came to Bluff in 1901, and the worst was yet to come.

The day Jens Peter returned, December 15, in spite of prayer meetings called by Bishop Nielson, five-year-old Lynn Decker died of diphtheria. The bishop presided over the memorial meeting that afternoon, though the little body could not be brought into the meetinghouse for fear of infection. The next day, James Bean Decker, whom everyone had known since the Hole in the Rock, and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Gertrude, died also, no more than three days after showing symptoms. The ward members, aghast, did what they could. One large grave was dug. The quarantined surviving family members, along with Jody Lyman and Joseph Barton, who were also quarantined as nurses, went to the grave site first, then returned home as the those in town not isolated held a memorial service. More families were quarantined as the illness spread to other households. Dogs seen playing around the Deckers’ home were killed. Church meetings, then school, then all public meetings were suspended after the bleak new year began. When the postmaster fell sick the mail was shut off as well. Seventeen-year-old Horace Decker and nine-year-old Clare Decker died in late January. Sister Decker, having lost her husband and four of her eleven children within six weeks, was “nearly driven to distraction” within the confines of her home. “This is the most terrible plague ^[393] that Bluff has ever known, and we wonder what the end will be.”⁹⁵

As it turned out, the diphtheria epidemic ravaged only the Deckers. Although other people developed symptoms, no one else died from it. Public meetings resumed at the beginning of March, though a few more homes showing signs of scarlet fever were quarantined after that. Still the awful chain of misfortune had one last link. At 3:30 a.m. on April 17, the town was awakened by the pealing of the church bell. The home of John Larson was on fire. Larson, a former sailor, had come to town during the gold rush in 1892 and had been baptized. Within the last month, the fifty-four year old man had married sixteen-year-old Lenorah Hadden of Parowan. When the flames flickered out, searchers were terrified to find the charred remains of Sister Larson in her bed. Enough of her remained to determine that before the fire she had been brutally assaulted with an ax, and the fire had been ignited to cover the crime. This grisly sight haunted many who were there forever after.⁹⁶ Some suspicion fell on Brother Larson, since he had not been entirely stable before the event occurred, though many later professed it was done by a tramp who had been in town that day but who had left before the evidence against him came to light.⁹⁷

Throughout these mortal distresses, life continued. The men at Bluff returned to the “nasty hard job” of scratching out the ditch, breaking only occasionally for wrestling ^[394] or racing contests and the demanding routine of herding their stock.⁹⁸ The fruit came in plentifully in 1901, but there was continued wrangling with cowboys in Monticello over the fences the men in Bluff were building on Elk Mountain.⁹⁹ Lemuel Redd’s imposing home was completed, France and Leona Nielson were starting to build one of their own, and Kirsten was proud that the ward finally finished its Relief Society hall.¹⁰⁰ The renewed drought continued to make their lives precarious, yet despite their struggles, residents also saw the advantages of where they lived. When Joe Nielson wrote to Ida from Colorado in the waning summer of 1902, they both agreed, “I am glad my home is in Bluff. I feel something like you say you do—would not change home with anyone even if it is so far from civilization.”¹⁰¹

Posterity

Legitimacy

Bluff’s struggle to survive and prosper exacted a heavy price from the settlers themselves, but it also was hard on the land from which they extracted their living. At the quarterly stake conference in February 1903, a committee was appointed to look into dry farming.¹⁰² At Bluff, however, the farming was in danger of being too wet. The San ^[395] Juan River continued to eat into the land below Bluff at Walton’s Slough, which meant the toilers of Bluff now had two contrary tasks. Upstream they endeavored to coax the water into town, while at the same time below Bluff they had to keep the water away from the fields. In 1903 they began to build a dam across the slough, using all of their old tricks and also some new ones. The men reinforced the dirt with rocks, logs, and riprap, and they also used a pile driver. They strengthened “the dam work,” as they came to call it, the next winter.¹⁰³ Between this and the renewed drought, it seemed to some that the county was “going to the dogs” and was “hardly the miserable ghost of what it used to be 11 years ago.”¹⁰⁴

Regardless of how they felt about the land it finally became theirs. Even as the river was carrying away Bluff’s fields, the town’s inhabitants finally secured their claim to what remained. By early 1903, the government surveyors had finished their work and the necessary notices had been published in the newspapers. On April 21, all those occupying land in Bluff appeared before the traveling judge of the Seventh District Court and at long last became landowners in the eyes of the United States Government. It was a satisfying day for the bishop and all those who had spent so much of themselves on this ground for so many years.¹⁰⁵

Soon after Bluff won its land, it lost some range. Navajo herders continued to spread their flocks north of the San Juan on land Bluff stockmen considered part of their ^[396] own pasture. Jens summed up the charitably impatient attitude of his ward members in church on one such occasion when he declared that while he respected the rights of the Navajos, “we also desire them to respect our rights.”¹⁰⁶ He continued the old diplomacy of sending delegations across the San Juan to negotiate removal of the Navajo herds to the south side of the river.¹⁰⁷ But these intrusions happened more often as the drought continued, acutely increasing competition for the scarce grass to the east of Bluff. Perhaps to ease the pressure on the range, Lemuel Redd and other people in Bluff sent a petition requesting that the government help the starving Navajos along the San Juan. A commission headed by Jens Nielson, Howard Antes (the Methodist missionary at Aneth), and Samuel Shoemaker (a government demonstration farmer), would distribute any aid allocated. But when the Indian agent investigated, he found no starving Navajos. Antes accused the Mormons of devising the plan to increase business through their co-op, but he had no proof. A year later, however, with the lobbying of Antes and William Shelton, the respected superintendent of the Shiprock Agency, the Navajos won a further extension of their reservation. By executive order 324A, President Theodore Roosevelt added the Aneth Area to the Navajo Reservation in 1905.¹⁰⁸ Just as the Mormon mission had grown in numbers and expanded successfully to the north, so had the Navajos, but at the expense of the Mormons. ^[397]

The Utes and Paiutes remaining in the county had little to console them as they continued to struggle to survive in traditional ways on dwindling resources. The Paiutes had been added to the rolls of the Southern Ute Agency in Colorado in 1895, but those who lived there at all did so for only part of the year. Resources on the reservation were not much greater than those in San Juan County, even adding in the inconsistent rations. So many Utes and Paiutes continued to live “out of the blanket” most of the time. This was increasingly more difficult, since Monticello and Verdure, along with the wide-ranging livestock, severely constricted the land and game the Indians had to live on. As the pressure grew, so did the conflicts.¹⁰⁹ By now the Mormons were less likely to patiently suffer thefts than they had been in the early years. The Indian Posey was arrested in 1903 for stealing a horse but escaped before his trial ended, despite being wounded in the leg. Facing a grim echo of what had happened to Native Americans across the continent, Posey began to wonder how to push back the white settlers. Meanwhile, the opinion of those in Bluff and Monticello toward him continued to decline: “Posey has murder in his heart,” wrote Albert Lyman at the time, “and his advantage over us is that he has no conscience and would not scruple to shoot us in the back if he could conceal his guilt, but we would not kill him but in self defense.”¹¹⁰ The difference between how Mormons treated these Indians and how other “Americans” treated them grew narrower. ^[398]

Father and Grandfather

The year 1903 was a festive one for the Nielsons. In January and October, Freeman and Uriah married the Perkins cousins, Maggie and Beatrice. Jens performed the earlier ceremony in Bluff, and Rye and Bea traveled to the temple in Salt Lake City. In between, however, a miracle happened. Forty-one-year-old Jens Peter Nielson married Martha Jane “Jennie” Roberts in Farmington, New Mexico. Now all of Jens’s children were married, and the next generation came in force.

By the end of 1903, Jens had thirty-six grandchildren, and they all lived in Bluff. The oldest was Joe’s boy Eddie, who was eighteen, and the youngest were infants: four of them had been born within the past year. These grandchildren often visited Jens’s homes, which were surrounded by fruit trees and berry bushes. Despite Elsie’s occasional stern warnings to them about staying out of the raspberries, Jens let the children eat what they wanted. While they did not fully understand his traditional maxims, such as “Eat what you can and can what you can’t,” they enjoyed the bounty anyway.¹¹¹ They might have figured out these sayings had something to do with the stories their grandfather had told them about his handcart ordeal, how adults got only a small teacup full of flour per day and children even less. Some starving pioneers, he told his small audience, would beg the leaders to press down the flour in the cup so they could have more.¹¹² Jens was kind and understanding with his grandchildren, but they were bothered by how one side of his ^[399] beard was a little longer than the other. They also remembered the sore that never healed on his nose and his extremely long prayers: “By the time he got around to blessing the General Authorities for the third time, we knew he was almost finished.”¹¹³

Jens was also the patriarch of Bluff. He and the score of families who chose to stay came to know each other intimately through all their celebrations, mournings, endeavors, and arguments during the generation they had lived together. As bishop, he had done so much for so many of its citizens that “we all felt that he was a father to every one.”¹¹⁴ He helped the town develop the contrasting characteristics that most impressed outsiders: dogged tenacity and kind hospitality. Walter Lyman “said he had never met a person who was as active and full of energy as Bishop Nielson was who had made as few enemies as he had.”¹¹⁵ He was also a grandfather to the town. The ward’s children looked up to him as their white-haired bishop, as much a part of their landscape as the red cliffs. He was something of a literal grandfather to the town as well. Out of the fifteen nine- and ten-year-old children in Albert Lyman’s Sunday School class in 1905, five of them were Jens’s direct grandchildren, and he was related through the marriage of his children to seven others.¹¹⁶

If he were disposed to make such connections as he surveyed his long life, Jens might have noticed its similarity to that of the biblical patriarch Abraham. Both men ^[400] were called out of a foreign land, were willing to sacrifice their firstborn, took other wives after the first was barren but had children by all of them, and were blessed with prosperity and great posterity, they believed, due to their faithfulness.¹¹⁷ Now, as Bishop Nielson approached the last years of his life, his family was gathered around him. His children had caused him great concern at times in their lives, but they had become, if not exactly what he hoped, a credit to his name and good citizens in the county.

Enduring to the End

Jens Nielson’s trials were not over, though he had one last happy night. On December 8, Bluff threw a reception for Jens Peter and Jennie, and the dancing and dining went on until one in the morning. No future joy in Jens’s life would be as complete. Just before Christmas, his son Joe caught typhoid pneumonia. Almost too fast for his family to hope it did not happen, Joe died on Christmas Eve. He was forty-three years old and the father of eight children, the youngest boy had just been born in September. The funeral on Christmas Day was “indeed a sad occasion,” despite the efforts of the ward to decorate the meeting hall and provide beautiful music. Joe was the son who was most like his father, “large and well built, . . . a man full of faith and good works, [who] made friends wherever he went,” as Albert Lyman eulogized him in his journal. “He is Brother or Uncle Joe to the Bluff folks, and if he is called only Joe it is not through disrespect, but rather through love.”¹¹⁸ He was also widely respected among his friends and business ^[401] associates in Colorado, “the most honest and liberal man in this part of the country.”¹¹⁹ C. L. Christensen reflected on “the gloom [it] cast over the whole community,” wondering why “such men are not spared to do good as these kind of men are very scarce.”¹²⁰ Jens wondered that as well. He tried to comfort the family by explaining Joe had “gone to prepare a place for us,” but the survivors felt “our sorrow is more than we can bear.”¹²¹ Kirsten fell ill for the next two weeks after her dear son’s passing. Although he did not know it at the time, Jens had been speaking to himself four days before Joe’s death when he told his ward, “All will have to be tried to see that we are on a sure foundation.”¹²²

The heart of the old bishop never entirely recovered from this hardest blow of all. He carried on through the first difficult days, thanking the ward members the next Sunday for their kindnesses and reminding them to settle their tithing if they had not already.¹²³ In time, his spirits revived. During the May quarterly conference he returned to his foundation of optimism and obedience. “Keep your plate right side up,” he told the assembled Saints. “Be careful about your duties and agencies.”¹²⁴ The next year on the same occasion he proclaimed, “I feel thankful for the blessings we enjoy in this part of ^[402] the land. . . . I have no reason to complain.”¹²⁵ But at the same time, when he heard or sang the hymn he loved so much, “When Joseph His Brethren Beheld,” it brought more melancholy than before.¹²⁶

The San Juan River did not relent. Efforts to control its waters continued, and as usual, enormous efforts won only small success. The river had washed away “a good many acres of the Bluff field” in the previous years, and in 1905 it swept away much of the dam meant to keep it away.¹²⁷ The high river that summer also continually broke through the banks of the ditch, making it difficult to irrigate, which in effect extended the drought.¹²⁸ The men of Bluff had to do fifteen hundred dollars of riprapping in the first two months of 1906 to try to save what was left of their fields.

Once again, many Bluff residents found a more desirable place to live. Walter Clisbee Lyman’s vision of a village on White Mesa had come true. Difficulties with irrigation and Lyman’s two-year mission had caused the plans to be delayed until 1903, when Albert Lyman and his wife, Lell, became the first residents in the settlement, eventually named Grayson.¹²⁹ Jody Lyman bought the old LC Ranch in the area. In 1904, at a meeting held on top of a pile of wood, the Grayson Branch was organized subsidiary to ^[403] the Bluff Ward. By 1905 the town was a growing concern, and Grayson farmers were planting, among other things, wheat and oats, “crops not heard of in Bluff.”¹³⁰ Jens Peter Nielson was skeptical. At first he quipped that he would not give his corn patch in Bluff for all of White Mesa. “The San Juan, however, annexed that corn patch,” and Jens Peter later put in a “fine field” on White Mesa and built the first “real house” there.¹³¹ In future years, as Bluff continued to diminish, Grayson, later called Blanding, absorbed most of the exodus.¹³²

The bishop’s health declined along with the population of his ward. He still limped out to his fields some mornings and pulled an unfortunate weed or two, but that was about all the work he could do anymore.¹³³ In February 1905, Albert Lyman sent away for an “ear drum outfit” for the aging bishop.¹³⁴ Jens’s old afflictions continued to bedevil him, and his body swelled with dropsy. By the end of the year it became difficult for him to do anything but sit in a large rocking chair in Elsie’s house. After twenty-five years, Jens felt he could no longer perform the duties of bishop. He quietly presented his resignation to his stake president, Walter Lyman, who sent it on to Salt Lake City for ^[404] approval.¹³⁵ From his post in the rocking chair, Jens continued to follow the fortunes and misfortunes of his growing family. Caroline lost another baby after merely a month of life. France’s oldest boy, Lisle, died at age eleven due to complications after a broken leg.¹³⁶ But Jens also performed a few final ordinances for his grandchildren, confirming three of them into Church membership in the late summer and fall of 1905.

In meetings of the Bluff Ward conference on January 6 and 7, 1906, “Bishop Jens Nielson, owing to his advanced age and failing health [was] tendered his release.” It had been approved, as he had insisted all along, by the First Presidency and his stake presidency. Jens had held the position from the first autumn in Bluff, when Erastus Snow called him before the old log meetinghouse was built. Lemuel Redd now became the bishop, with Kumen Jones remaining as first counselor. Francis Nielson was called as the second counselor in the Bluff Ward. Jens told the congregation that the new bishopric was “perfectly satisfactory to him. They were men who had always been faithful to their mission.” He recalled some stories from the ward’s history then told the Saints in his melodic Danish voice that “he laid down his labors as bishop with a great deal of satisfaction. . . . He exhorted the saints to be humble and faithful and sustain those called to preside over them.”¹³⁷

As Jens’s last days ran out, he remained in the big rocking chair, unable to sleep lying down. His mind stayed lucid to the end. Although confined to the northwest room of ^[405] Elsie’s red brick house, “he seemed to know all that went on in town.”¹³⁸ Some of it was horrible. May Jones, Kumen’s second wife, died from burns she suffered trying to save her home and children from a fire caused by an overturned oil lantern. Mary Jones became the mother of May’s eight children, in addition to her own son.¹³⁹ But these griefs had to be salved by younger men now.

Jens’s mind swept back across his past and found “genuine satisfaction” in how he had converted to the Church in Denmark, crossed the plains, “how he had helped build towns and grown old as a pioneer.”¹⁴⁰ The dying man also peered into the future. He seemed ready to find out what came next, speaking “rationally and calmly about the expected change.”¹⁴¹ When Joe’s oldest boy, Eddie, visited before leaving on his mission, Jens told him, “Before you return, I will be on the other side, and I will never see you again in mortality. I hope I am good enough to see the Prophet Joseph Smith and some of the other leaders.”¹⁴² But his thoughts had not entirely left the earth. A few days before the end, he wondered to those present if there were enough men in town to bury him.¹⁴³ As Jens’s family gathered about him on his last day, he reviewed his life one more time, “telling them again how the gospel had come to him in his native land, and how he had embraced it and cherished it always through tribulation.” He repeated his conviction that ^[406] Joseph Smith was a prophet of God through whom the gospel had been restored.¹⁴⁴ Jens Nielson died on April 20, 1906, a few days before his eighty-sixth birthday.

Long before, two weeks prior to when he volunteered to be called to the San Juan in 1879, Jens opened the Cedar Ward’s fast meeting. He said he was thankful for his association with the Saints of God. He declared “the Lord will have a tried people.” “We must school ourselves in the principles of the gospel,” he continued. In order for any to do well, “we must observe the counsel of the holy priesthood.”¹⁴⁵ These were the same principles he maintained so tenaciously in Bluff. They were what he had learned when he escaped the snows of the Rockies and made a solemn promise he never forgot. “How far I have come short of this promise,” he wrote his son Uriah forty-five years later, “I do not know, but I have been called to make six new homes, and, as far as this goes, I have fulfilled my promise.”¹⁴⁶ Soon after Bishop Nielson died, his ward members carried his body to its final home in Utah on the hill overlooking Bluff. His will requested a burial lot at least a rod square with a “respectable fence” and “a suitable and respectable headstone or monument.”¹⁴⁷ The obelisk marking his grave rises out of Bluff’s sandy soil and points toward heaven. ^[407]