Jens Nielson’s last task was to stay where he was. This was made harder by the fact that he was used to moving. As a young man he was driven by ambition into Denmark’s landholding class. Just as he arrived at that status he converted to Mormonism and was driven by faith across the Atlantic and most of America. Along the way he lost his former friends and reputation, his homeland, much of his money, his firstborn son, and almost his life. After he arrived in Utah, the Zion of his new religion, Church leaders assigned him to settle in five different towns over the next two decades. As he approached sixty, Jens volunteered to start a remote outpost somewhere in the southeastern corner of the territory. The trek there was almost impossible, and it was only the beginning of labors for the pioneers who traveled through the Hole in the Rock to found the town of Bluff. Jens soon became the bishop in Bluff, a position he held for twenty-five years. He determined he would not leave this place that was so unlike where he was born.
Bluff was the back eddy of empires, settled on one of “the last blank spot[s] on the United States map.”1 It was planted in 1880 near the end of Mormon colonization [1] and in one of the few unsettled corners left in the country.2 Bluff’s citizens confronted many of the problems most westerners faced. Water was their first and enduring concern. Relations with their native and new neighbors were often unpredictable and could turn violent. The federal government was an important force in this region, at times helping and at times hindering their development. It was hard for tenderfoot lawmen to administer justice. The colonizers were isolated and intimidated by the scale and the ruggedness of the land. But much of Bluff ran counter to the trends. Its pioneers traveled east, to worse land than they previously had, to help, they believed, the Indians of the region. Rather than grant the settlers homesteads, Congress almost gave their homes back to the Native American tribes. Bluff’s residents often felt more threatened by the cowboys around them than by the Indians, and they were very hesitant to call in the cavalry. Finally, this town’s sturdy settlers endeavored not to be rugged individualists but rather to form an orthodox cooperative community based on inherited patterns and directed by religious authorities from afar.3 [2]
In many ways, Bluff was different from typical western towns for the same reasons most Mormon settlements were different. They were usually settled by the direction of Church leadership, and they pursued principles of cooperation and unity. These towns followed a basic settlement template in laying out the land and establishing institutions. Many had some sort of economic or political mission to fulfill, making the whole town, not just a segment of specialized churchmen, into missionaries. But even among Mormon settlements, Bluff was unusual in some ways. The “second exodus” through the Hole in the Rock to Bluff, a six-month ordeal, caused its pioneers to develop a unique sense of identity that grew with time in those who endured in the settlement. They were cut off by the Colorado River and austere canyon country from the main core of Mormons. Geography aimed their town more toward the fledgling non-Mormon outposts and economies in Colorado, which made the Mormons feel like strangers in their home territory. The sense of separateness, not just from the non-Mormon world but from most of Mormonism, was strengthened as they endured prolonged crude living conditions and an atrociously high level of labor to stay where they were. In our time, when opportunities for physical work have to be rented in health clubs and microwaves are too slow, all pioneer life looks difficult. But the toil and discomfort exacted from those who lived in Bluff daunted even experienced colonizers.
Bluff’s missionaries expected to be a civilizing force amid opposition, a “fort on the firing line,” as one of the town’s children put it.4 They believed strongly in their [3] religious errand and quickly assumed the legitimacy and authority of the new government of San Juan County to help them organize the area in their image. But the cattlemen, outlaws, miners, and small-scale settlers who arrived around them, as well as the Navajos, Utes, and Paiutes who had been there for some time, usually had other ideas. Bluff’s advantages helped the Mormons control the county, but not always in the ways and to the degree they hoped. Bluff’s frontier turned out to be more of a restless borderland, in which each of the groups converging on the county pursued its own goals, at times in sympathy and at others in antagonism toward each other.5 Some had more success than others, but few left empty-handed. This was also true of those who lived in Bluff. They brought and held a strong Mormon presence in the county, but only by spawning new settlements. Bluff [4] itself was a sieve for settlers; no more than a fifth of those who came before 1906 stayed for any significant length of time. The San Juan missionaries established more peaceful relations with the Indians than most non-Mormon bands but made little headway in assimilating or converting Navajos, Utes, or Paiutes. As time passed, the Bluff Saints emphasized the effects their mission had on themselves at least as much as what it did for those around them.
To stay where they were, Bishop Jens Nielson and the others in Bluff had to adapt. They originally hoped to embody the pioneer principles of cooperation and unity by building an independent agricultural village. But the San Juan River denied their crops dependable water, and most of the colonists left. Those who stayed, though increasingly dogmatic about holding Bluff, were practical enough to recognize that the ideal of the agricultural village would not permit them to survive. So they switched much of their energy to raising livestock as a new means to sustain their mission, and they tried to do it cooperatively.6 Those who stayed also generated the towns of Monticello, Verdure, and Blanding. This diversification helped the communities prosper and keep more people, but the cowboy lifestyle and the wealth it brought threatened their spiritual and social principles to an unacceptable degree.7 The older citizens were especially alarmed when they saw what [5] was happening to their children. The shift to livestock also made the town more dependent on outside markets and susceptible to the national economy, which both helped and hurt their mission. Mormons seized control of more of the county’s rangeland, which helped them secure the area politically, but this undermined their efforts with the Indians by creating more direct competition for the region’s limited resources. Bluff’s leaders saw these disorienting influences and fought against them to maintain the settlement’s precarious balance. Economic failure could force them to abandon their mission, but success could ruin them as well. Church leaders’ rearguard actions against individualism, partisanship, and unbounded capitalism, though ultimately unsuccessful, were in force throughout Utah at this time. Although Bishop Nielson and the other leaders of his generation belonged almost entirely to the pioneer age and its principles, modernizing forces had made Bluff less peculiar to Mormons, and to westerners in general, by the time he died.8
Bluff was never far from failure during Jens Nielson’s life. Many Mormon towns in harsh environments were abandoned, and Bluff’s physical and cultural environments were especially harsh.9 On the periphery of Mormon settlement, Bluff’s residents sometimes [6] felt misunderstood and neglected in their struggles. Pragmatic adaptation and diversification helped the town continue, but it could not have survived on these alone. By most rational measures, Bluff should have been abandoned, and a farmer as hardheaded as Jens Nielson should have led the exodus. But Bishop Nielson was not an entirely reasonable man. He had bound himself to obey Church authorities, and this stubborn faith required him to stay in Bluff, no matter how impractical. This was not a question of orthodoxy versus apostasy. Those who left Bluff generally did not leave Mormonism. Other equally faithful men viewed the town differently from Jens: the General Authorities of the Church were usually divided on preserving it, and Jens’s immediate leaders were appalled at what it cost to maintain the place. Regardless of others’ arguments, until the Church’s leaders released him from Bluff, Jens Nielson would not go. This impractical steadfastness in the bishop and some others preserved Bluff on many occasions when no amount of adaptation alone could have saved it.
Much has already been written about Bluff. The first group of histories (and still the great majority) consists of recollections by the original settlers and their numerous descendants. These are indispensable sources of information, but largely episodic and uncritical. They are fully sympathetic to the Mormon settlers, paying little attention to their neighbors except as friends or foils to the heroic quest. Typical of these recollections are the many works of Albert R. Lyman (the “Old Settler,” who was born just before Bluff began and lived into the Kennedy administration) and the Saga of San [7] Juan, by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers.10
Broader studies began emerging in the 1950s and 1960s. University of Utah historian David E. Miller wrote the classic account of the Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition but stopped when the settlers arrived at Bluff. Bryant Jensen continued the story from there in his master’s thesis. He unearthed much valuable information, but his coverage was sketchy, and many important sources were not yet available. Franklin Day devoted his thesis to the cattle industry in the county, which led to further investigations of this aspect by Don D. Walker.11
In the next decades, some of Utah’s top historians turned their attention to this corner of the state. Charles S. Peterson came the closest to a revisionist view of Bluff in the first section of Look to the Mountains, published in 1975.12 He agreed with the majority of the early settlers of Bluff, who suspected the mission extracted too much work to justify the results. Leonard Arrington surveyed Bluff’s history as a backdrop for the [8] Redd family in his biography on Charlie Redd.13 Today’s leading scholar on the history of San Juan County is Robert S. McPherson of the College of Eastern Utah’s Blanding campus. His many well-crafted works have done an admirable job of evening accounts by bringing neglected aspects of San Juan County, such as Native Americans and the environment, back into the picture. He has also written articles on episodes in Bluff’s story (the Indian removal question, the cattle industry, law enforcement, the gold rush) in the Utah Historical Quarterly and the regional journal Blue Mountain Shadows.14 In short, while recent scholars have brought enormous talent to the study of Bluff, the town itself has usually been collateral to their main interests. No one has attempted to write the early history of the town using the documentary and statistical sources that are now available.
Jens Nielson was a large man in stature, enthusiasm, and personality. This combination seemed to attract attention, and he quickly became a leader wherever he went. One of Jens’s associates indicated the range in his character by describing him as having “indomitable courage” as well as being the “old comic boy.”15 Joseph F. Smith [9] called him “one of the grandest men the church ever had.”16 Albert Lyman has composed brief, moving sketches of Bishop Nielson’s life, but aside from these and family reminiscences little has been written about him. As the bishop of Bluff, Jens Nielson was the community’s mainspring, “connected directly or indirectly with all its life-giving activities.”17
This book is a detailed history of late-pioneer-era Mormonism in one of its harshest environments. It will describe the life of Bishop Nielson and the history of Bluff from 1880 to 1906, explaining how and why the settlers persisted where they did during these years, and what difference it made that they did. [10]
1. Aton and McPherson, River Flowing from the Sunrise, 1.
2. Mormon colonization in the West is analyzed in Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom; Meinig, “Mormon Culture Region,” 191–209; Wahlquist, “Settlement Processes in the Mormon Core Area”; and Sherlock, “Mormon Migration and Settlement.”
3. Mormon town planning was more a pattern than a prescription. For its basic premises, characteristics, adaptations, and exceptions, see Nelson, Mormon Village; Ricks, Forms and Methods of Early Mormon Settlement; Peterson, “Imprint of Agricultural Systems”; Jackson and Layton, “Mormon Village”; Jackson, “Mormon Village: Genesis and Antecedents.” See also May, Three Frontiers, for how a Mormon town differed in its principles and practices from two other western towns.
4. Lyman, “Fort on the Firing Line.”
5. San Juan County in the late 1800s is a particularly good spot to see interaction in the West. Each of the three major schools of historical thought toward the West add meaning to what happened there. Bluff’s settlers certainly would have been sympathetic to the perspective of Frederick Jackson Turner, most directly stated in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” They felt they were “the outer edge of the wave,” albeit an eastbound wave of settlement, and if they didn’t quite feel they were at “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” it was because of the sympathy they had toward the Native Americans generated by the Book of Mormon, a history of ancient inhabitants of America. Turner would have been disappointed in Bluff, since it did not meet, except for maybe its unruly children, his predictions for democratization and institutional improvisation. Ray Allen Billington has updated this approach in his studies of the West. Herbert E. Bolton’s multilateral borderlands framework is a helpful way to look at the various groups in San Juan County, especially considering that the Mormons, surrounding states, and the federal government, while not exactly rival empires, all had their own interests, particularly in dealing with Native Americans. Bolton’s ideas were written in his cornerstone work, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest and updated by John Francis Bannon, The Spanish Borderland Frontier, 1513–1821. The continued priority to pay attention to everyone and a regional focus on competition for limited resources are important contributions made by the “New Western Historians.” Who controlled the range and the water were highly important in how things turned out in San Juan County during this time. The seminal works of this group are Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, and White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own.” The three schools may, as some have suggested, function as an overall process, as frontier yields to borderlands, which becomes region. See Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin, “Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western History,” in Under an Open Sky, 7.
6. This argument is similar to that used by Leone in “Evolution of Mormon Culture in Eastern Arizona” to describe why some of the settlements on the Little Colorado River survived. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints produced “individuals capable of adapting themselves to changing economic realities while preserving their ideological independence within American culture.”
7. Abruzzi, “Ecology, Resource Redistribution,” argues against Leone that instead of cooperative adaptation, what saved the colonies on the Little Colorado was the effective redistribution of resources that multihabitat settlements and the tithing network allowed. San Juan County was different from the Arizona settlements. Economic and regional diversification helped to make life more tolerable and further the goals of the mission.
8. For the general tension between communal and individual endeavors in Utah settlements, see Arrington, Fox, and May, Building the City of God, xi–xii. The mainstreaming of Mormon politics, economy, and culture is described in Larson, “Americanization” of Utah; Lyman, Political Deliverance; and Alexander, Mormonism in Transition.
9. See Rosenvall, “Defunct Mormon Settlements.”
10. Among the most important of this generation are Jones, “Writings,” and Perkins, Nielson, and Jones, Saga of San Juan. Albert R. Lyman was an inveterate writer, whose vigorously lyric pen has written recollections of many of the first settlers, including Jens Nielson, as well as a number of loose histories of the area. See especially “History of San Juan County,” for many important pieces of information and Indians and Outlaws for rollicking tales of “the fight for San Juan.”
11. Miller, Hole-in-the-Rock; Jensen, “Historical Study of Bluff City”; Day, “Cattle Industry of San Juan County”; Walker, “Cattle Industry of Utah”; Walker, “Carlisles: Cattle Barons.”
12. Peterson, Look to the Mountains.
13. Arrington, Utah’s Audacious Stockman.
14. See McPherson, Northern Navajo Frontier; McPherson, History of San Juan County; and Aton and McPherson, River Flowing from the Sunrise; as well as the other works listed in the bibliography.
15. Lemuel H. Redd Sr., letter to family, January 22, 1889; Lemuel H. Redd Sr., Autobiographical Sketch, 1902.
16. Nielson, “Jens Nielson,” 58. The occasion for the comment was when Floyd, Jens’s grandson, returned from his mission to England in the 1920s and reported his activities to President Smith.
17. Lyman, “Bishop Jens Nielson: The Old Wagon,” 72.
