Conclusion

By many accounts, Jens Nielson kept busy after he died. Kumen Jones saw him “in a vision that was so real and so impressive that I can never doubt or deny it, which seemed to cement a friendship of a lifetime.”¹ Albert Lyman told of an “unforgettable dream” he had many years before he wrote his history of Bishop Nielson in 1936. The bishop signaled toward symbols representing his sons and impressed on Lyman an obligation for the spiritual welfare of his children.² A few days before Elsie died in 1914, she refused to get out of bed. She felt fine but announced that her husband had visited her the night before, and he said he was coming back to get her a few nights later. Sure enough, on the date Elsie indicated, she died from no obvious cause.³ Kirsten had passed on in 1908.

Five months after Jens Nielson died, Bishop Lemuel Redd and the presidency of the San Juan Stake met with the First Presidency and some of the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City to discuss Bluff one last time. “It was decided to abandon that place.”^{4 [409]} A month after this often-awaited, unconditional release, the property owners in Bluff met and appointed Bishop Redd, Kumen Jones, Francis Nielson, Hyrum Perkins, and Hanson Bayles as a committee to appraise the town and, if possible, sell it to the United States government as an Indian school. Superintendent William T. Shelton of the Shiprock Navajo Agency and Senator Reed Smoot of Utah seemed supportive of the idea, but the Senate never made the appropriation, and the sale never occurred.⁵ The San Juan River finally claimed the Old Swing Tree during floods in 1907.⁶

The town did not die, though most of the original settlers and their children left within a decade of Bishop Nielson’s passing. Kumen Jones became bishop after Lemuel Redd was made the stake president in 1909.⁷ An oil boom a few miles down the river in 1908 brought a swell of settlers, but it subsided by 1912.⁸ Mormon refugees from the turmoil in the Mexican colonies came to the county but settled mostly in Blanding and Monticello. Tourists kept using Bluff as a base camp for their expeditions to see relics ^[410] and natural wonders.⁹ Federal rangers of the new La Sal National Forest stepped in to manage and rehabilitate the range.¹⁰ The Bluff ditch, which had cost at least $150,000 in materials and labor and an inestimable amount of grief and faith during its precarious existence, quietly fell into disrepair.¹¹ Some in Bluff tried to raise lucerne with a ditch from Cottonwood Wash, but by 1920, less than two hundred acres were being farmed, and soon after only a few families remained. Many of the sandstone homes built by the past generation “were left vacant to fall in ruins.”¹²

Still the town survived. Automobiles, better roads, clean water, and telephones came to Bluff soon after Jens Nielson died, and eventually even electricity arrived along with a new burst of settlers during the uranium-mining boom in the 1950s.¹³ All these things brought a way of life scarcely glimpsed by Bishop Nielson, who had lived in Bluff when it was a mission with pioneer conveniences. Jens threw his whole soul into the town during the last years of his life, and the force of his personality and conviction carried many with him in the uncomfortable determination to stay. But for what ends?

Bluff succeeded partially in the objectives that caused its creation, though all its ^[411] successes came with a cost. The town held a corner of Zion for Mormon settlement, but was sacrificed in the process. Disappointments with the ditch and competition for the range caused the settlers to spread out, and Bluff became the parent settlement for Monticello, Verdure, and Blanding. But their prosperity came at the parent’s expense as population and political power shifted north. The Mormon communities’ deeper commitment to the county allowed them to outlast most outside cattle companies and gentile settlers from Colorado. But the Mormons’ success in holding the country devastated it as well. The range and its riverbanks were ravaged from overstocking, drought, and erosion.¹⁴ Bluff itself became a respectable town through tremendous effort, but since the settlers stripped the banks of the San Juan, the river undermined that town by becoming increasingly more difficult to tame and washing away many acres of its farms. They were part of the “farming, grazing, and, to a lesser extent, mineral extraction on the San Juan” that have “hastened more erosion than a Pleistocene flood.”¹⁵ As was true in other Mormon settlements, the ethic of intensive development of resources let the colonists survive but “made some deserts as well as gardens.”¹⁶

Bluff’s mission to the Indians was also successful in part. The town’s strategic position on the San Juan buffered not just Indian-Mormon relations but also the rivalry ^[412] between Native Americans that might have resumed if the Navajos had tried their northern expansion directly at the Utes’ expense. San Juan County was certainly more peaceful because of Bluff. The settlers were rightfully proud of their pacific record compared with the annual eruptions and murders that happened between Indians and gentile settlers. To the settlers, this was “as marvelous . . . as any of the miracles of old.”¹⁷ Bluff’s citizens had responded peacefully to provocations, and they had tried not to provoke the Indians themselves. Over time the Mormons and Indians had developed acquaintances, understandings, and even, in some cases, trust, respect, and friendship. Kumen Jones in his later years declared, “I have become very much prejudiced in favor of the Navajo as a nation.”¹⁸ But the Bluff missionaries were never able to significantly convert the Indians to their way of living or to their way of believing. Bluff’s residents always wished their neighbors well, but their direct efforts decreased over time.¹⁹ Brother Jones was left to reflect wistfully, “When I . . . have seen an Indian school completed and in use at Bluff, I will be ready to pass on.”²⁰

The Native Americans in San Juan County had their own objectives, and Bluff fit into those plans in varying ways. The town presented no obstacle to the expansion of the Navajos’ reservation to the south bank of the San Juan River in 1884. It provided a ^[413] convenient place where Navajos could trade products, hire out their labor, and attend occasional celebrations. If the settlers’ desire for dividends raised prices at the co-op store too high, the Navajos could take their trade upriver.²¹ Since Bluff never boomed as its founders had hoped, the town never tried to expand south of the San Juan. But when Navajo herders increasingly crossed north of the river during the droughts of the 1890s and early 1900s, they came into conflict with those in Bluff. Navajo herders may have felt they were re-occupying land they had used before in times of want, but Bluff’s stockmen felt the Indians were violating their reservation and common-law boundary of the San Juan River, and the stockmen responded with what they felt was justified aggressiveness. But Bluff’s frustration never turned into physical aggression. The Navajos turned to other allies, the Methodist missionary Howard Antes and the federal government, and won reservation lands north of the San Juan around Antes’s Aneth mission. On the whole, the northern Navajos were better off because of Bluff’s presence, providing a rare example of Indian expansion during that time.

It was a different story for the Utes and Paiutes. Beneath Bluff’s benevolent demeanor was its inexorable expansion onto the ranges and into the new settlements farther north. The Utes and Paiutes were slowly squeezed out of their traditional lives and land. They also turned to the federal government and the state of Colorado in their competition with Mormon settlers, but in this case the crusade to convert the county into ^[414] a reservation failed. Especially when drought added to their misery, these tribes increased their demands on Mormon hospitality, and both sides built up resentments that weren’t fully resolved until the collision called Posey’s War in 1923. The Utes and Paiutes became strangers in their own land, an experience typical of American Indians across the continent.

As the limitations and frustrations of their mission became more apparent, Bluff’s settlers began to look inward more than outward for the vindication of their efforts. If nothing else, their mission was successful for what it had done to them. The colonists were pleased with their record in the Church: they had practiced “the full program,” paid full tithing, and sent out a large number of missionaries for such a small town. Bluff’s isolation became a sanctuary for the settlers and their children, with fewer outside influences than most Mormon places.²² As the town itself faltered, the townspeople preserved its ideals inside themselves. “Bluff is but a sorry remnant of what might be expected to show for the lives that were worn out with toil to carry it on to its destiny,” Albert Lyman reflected. But Bluff was “an extraordinary school” to which people were called for training, and its graduates salted many communities.²³ The unique identity that started with the Hole-in-the-Rock expedition and increased through Bluff’s relative isolation became embedded in the town’s legacy and has trickled down through its descendants. ^[415]

Bluff is an unusually stubborn study in persistence. It reinforces the idea that even into the twentieth century, some Mormon pioneers were committed enough to religious ideals to deny themselves the American dream. But it was always a struggle. The town was settled at that spot almost by accident but became doggedly defended. The colonists who feuded with each other during the first land lottery in April 1880 had no idea that would be the last time people would clamor for land at Bluff. That awful ditch became the symbol and annual test of their determination to stay where they were and make the desert bloom. But the pioneers were pragmatic enough to sense not only the faith but the folly of what they were doing. As Parley Butt put it, only half-jokingly, “I am pretty familiar with the San Juan River, which I wish I hadn’t been.”²⁴ What was said of the Sanpete settlements would easily be echoed farther south: “Every man ought to marry a wife from San Juan because, no matter what happens, she’s seen worse.”²⁵

Many reasons accounted for Bluff’s improbable ability to overcome its challenging situation. The group that stayed was a peculiar bunch. Many of them suffered together through the Hole in the Rock and multiplied that suffering on the ditch. The bonds forged in adversity were strengthened through celebration and mourning and inscribed in their institutions. The more they suffered together the more they invested of themselves in their town. Bishop Nielson was an anchor for their determination to make all their sacrifice worth something. He also became a leading ^[416] example of the delicate balance of steadfastness and pragmatism that they needed to practice if they were to stay. Kumen Jones felt that these unusual characters, with “their ‘hanging and rattling stickitatutiveness’ attracted other ‘birds of a feather’ so that it looks now that the better element will prevail over all obstacles.”²⁶ But only a small minority of those who came through Bluff had the requisite mix to stick it out.

Other factors were crucial to the town’s survival. Bluff’s isolation and adversity kept outsiders away, which helped forge that vital communal identity. Ironically, the town could survive where it was only with the help of the Gentiles it tried to keep out of the county. The jobs, products, markets, and credit supplied by the communities in Colorado were indispensable to Bluff’s viability as it weaned itself from the ideal of the agricultural village and based its life on livestock. Finally, Bluff’s core of settlers found ways to live with each other. They argued at some point over everything, but underneath the disputes ran a stronger commitment to the greater good. Sometimes it was excruciatingly difficult, but their leaders provided the incentive and the example to keep their differences from becoming contentions. In all, as Leonard Arrington concluded, “The settlement of Bluff is a superb example of the faith that moves mountains.”²⁷

But the mountains also modified faith. The town and its residents changed significantly by 1906. It had started as an idealistic throng of young families packed ^[417] together in a fort hoping to live as farmers, independent of any outside influence but religious direction. By the time Jens Nielson died, the town had built up into private, usually comfortable homes, whose residents made their living by various individual enterprises. Some were Republicans and some were Democrats; they got their grain from Monticello and Colorado, their frills by way of Montgomery Ward, Colorado merchants, or Salt Lake City, and the money to finance it all from whatever the national markets would bear for their cattle and sheep. The transformation in Bluff was its own particular chapter in something that was happening throughout the Mormon settlements. As opportunities increased and persecution withdrew, the siege mentality of Mormonism departed. Without outside pressure, cooperation and economic independence no longer seemed so crucial. As with many old ideals, they continued to be preached often and saluted regularly but practiced less. Mormons’ social patterns became more recognizable to the rest of the country, shifting from “staunch communitarianism to modified individualism,” and their peculiarity took refuge in their religious beliefs.²⁸

Viewed in human terms, the “affair on the San Juan” was a tragic waste.²⁹ The Church’s cooperation and organization as well as its leaders’ charisma and moral pressure held people to a life of privation and labor far longer than they would have withstood it on their own. In this sense, it was a fitting continuation of the Hole-in-the-Rock trek, the heroic quest that led ultimately to more of the same prolonged, slow-motion struggling in ^[418] Bluff.³⁰ But the same argument could be made against the entire Mormon exodus of the nineteenth century. These people were not, in general, trying to move up to a nicer neighborhood. Prosperity was welcomed and often seen as a sign of God’s favor. But it was supposed to be a consequence, not a goal, and could create its own mischief. Instead, the majority of those who moved to Bluff believed, as Jens Nielson did, that it was “the voice of the Lord” for them to go.³¹ But even within this spiritual context, spiritual men such as Bishop Nielson, Platte Lyman, Francis Hammond, and the General Authorities of the Church never entirely agreed on whether Bluff was worth the sacrifices required to keep it. Those who stayed with Bishop Nielson were outvoted by many more who left Bluff but not Mormonism. Although the question cannot be ultimately answered on this side of the grave, those who stayed felt they had their reward. While their faith impelled them to reside in such a harsh environment, struggling against that environment strengthened their faith.³² Even though most of the stalwarts groused while they were there and left Bluff as soon as they felt it was spiritually safe to do so, when they balanced accounts in their minds, they found, as did their bishop, great satisfaction rather than great bitterness at the bottom of their experiences.

Even in human terms, those who lived in Bluff found compensation for their extreme and prolonged labors. From the distance of over a century, Bluff reminds us of a ^[419] time when people with few conveniences labored for something besides abundance. A stone home, a shingled roof, a cushioned buggy passed for luxuries in the town’s early years, but water in the ditch, “a good time had by all,” and a day when the sand stayed still were at least as valuable. Community meant more than living near each other; it was a common commitment to resolve differences and pursue cooperative goals. The Bluff Saints lived in an unusual environment, even for their times, and accomplished unusual things. The fact that changing circumstances eroded their communal values and pitched the town into the stream of modernity does not eliminate this toilsome attempt to construct an alternative to the American dream. Modern society would not trade its luxuries or its privacy with Bluff, but sometimes it longs for what it left behind: the strong community and sense of shared purpose. To insist on these values at the expense of comfort is difficult. Even back in those days, there were few like the stubborn old Dane who would not leave. ^[420]