“Come on, Dad,” Joe Nielson called out. “If you don’t hurry up, ole David here is going to lose his nerve and bolt for freedom.”
The bishop shot him a dirty look. “Now you see vaht I haf to put up wit from my children.” He turned and looked at his son, Joe. “And don’t you be gettink any crazy ideas that you and that Lyman girl be gettink married qvick like dese two.”
Now it was Joe who blushed right down to the roots of his hair. Standing beside him, Ida Lyman looked like she was going to die. Besides Abby and Molly, there had been only three other single girls of marriageable age in the company. It hadn’t been long into the trip before everyone noticed that Joe and Ida Lyman were showing a growing interest in each other.
Then the old Dane grew more serious. “I suppose if vee do not haf a temple, that here beside this beautiful river in our new home be second best.” He turned to David and Abby. “If you two vood take your places. Facing me, please. You be looking at each other for many years to come, so it’s best if you look at me now.”
Now it was his wife who nudged him. “It’s time, Jens.”
“Brodder David, you may please take Abigail’s hand.” He waited until he did so. “I know dat dis be a varm day, so I haf only two things to say to dis vonderful couple. I once hear a very vise ole man give two pieces of advice. It vas given to a company of people travelink in de vilds of da desert, but it be goot advice for two people starting on da journey of life as well.”
He stopped, letting the anticipation build for a moment. “Advice piece number vun. When difficult times come in your marriage, remember dis. Even ven der is no way to go troo, you must go troo.”
That brought smiles and sober nods from everyone as they remembered the night he had spoken those exact words back in Forty Mile Camp. That had been a critical turning point for the company, and his words had made the difference.
“And do you know vaht be the second good advice piece?” His eyes were twinkling as he looked directly at David.
“I think I do,” David said. “I think the second important thing for a marriage is that both husband and wife have what that same wise old man called ‘stickity tootie.’”
The grizzled old head bobbed with great satisfaction. “Abigail, my dear, your husband to be is very vise too. You make goot choice.” He looked around at the others, who were all smiling again. “Yah, dis stickity tootie be a very goot quality for all of us, I tink.”
Then the smile died and he grew quite serious. “So, Brodder David and Sister Abby, vood you now turn and face each odder, still holding hands, please?”
They did so.
“Brodder David Dickinson Draper, do you take Sister Abigail Louise McKenna to be your lawful vedded vife, to take her as your own, as bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh, to love with all your heart, and to cherish her above all others, and all things, and troo all time?”
David looked deep into her eyes. “Yes.”
“Sister Abigail Louise McKenna, do you take dis man, Brodder David Dickinson Draper, to be your husband, lawfully vedded to him? And do you promise to love and cherish him above all others, and all things, and for all time?”
She smiled through her tears. “Yes.”
“Den, as a member of the San Juan Mission presidency and an elder in Da Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I pronounce you, David Draper, and you, Abigail McKenna, to be husband and vife. May your love forever remain as bright and true and pure as it is today.” He smiled down on both of them. “You may now kiss each odder as man and wife.”
A great cheer went up as David took her in his arms and drew her to him.
When they stepped back from each other, David raised a hand, and the applause and the calls of congratulations died away. “My wife—” he grinned like a little boy—“that sure sounds wonderful—has something she would like to say.”
“Say on,” the bishop said.
Abby took David’s hand again and pulled him up beside her. As she looked around at these friends and family whom she loved so dearly, her face was radiant. “I wanted to have this marriage performed on San Juan Hill, beside an inscription carved in the stone near the top. But it was too far, and there is too much to do here.”
She had to stop for a moment to get control of her voice. “All of you know now what that inscription says. It is five simple words. ‘We thank thee, O God.’” She drew in a quick breath. “Those words so perfectly signify everything that has brought us here today—as a family, as friends, as a company of missionaries, and, most of all, as husband and wife. Therefore what I have to say is only this.”
She grasped David’s hand in both of hers. “We thank thee, O God,” she said softly. “Oh, how we thank thee, our God.”
Epilogue
It is hard to say exactly how many participated in the two Hole in the Rock expeditions. David Miller lists forty who went with the exploring party, two hundred thirty-seven who were known to have been with the main company, and at least fifteen more who likely went with them. There were almost certainly others whose names are simply not known.1
A few others, both members and nonmembers of the Church, settled in the area independently about that same time. George Harris, his wife, and their two sons emigrated from Colorado and settled near Bluff after the exploring party had departed again, but before the main company returned. But it is not likely that even three hundred people came into the San Juan River Valley that first year.
After an incredibly challenging journey through virtually impossible terrain, the pioneers arrived, not at some lush valley surrounded by verdant mountains, as so many other Mormon settlements had done. They stopped their wagons in the narrow plain of a swift-moving river subject to spring flooding. In spite of enormous effort, the river proved almost impossible to tame for irrigation. Good farmland was limited. They had to hold two different lotteries to assign out city and garden lots. Many families had no choice but to turn to ranching—spreading their herds across vast areas of rich to sparse grazing land—or move on to other settlements.
Another issue was the cultural climate. As Elder Erastus Snow had warned, the area provided an unusual kind of a challenge to those first settlers. Wedged in between the great Navajo nation on the south and the Utes and Paiutes to the north and east, the community was particularly susceptible to petty thievery and livestock rustling. The Mormons got along better with the Indians than most other whites, but there were still some tensions and, occasionally, violent outbreaks. Another problem was that for a time, the presence of the little colony didn’t do much to push out the lawless element—the cattle rustlers, horse thieves, bank robbers, highwaymen, moral trash, and renegade Indians still found refuge in the desolate, sparsely populated country. The small fort the settlers built at Bluff was aptly named “Fort on the Firing Line.”2
But eventually the mission fulfilled its purpose. The members of the Church from across southern Utah called to colonize the San Juan/Four Corners area were sent to establish peace with the Indians and to plant a stabilizing influence there. In that they were successful, becoming a buffer between warring and lawless elements in the area. While there were occasional problems with a few of the natives, there never again was widespread war. As settlements were established, peace and order became the norm.
Ironically, the road that had been carved through the wilderness at such a terrible cost was used only for a short time. For about a year, it was the only road between the southern settlements and the Four Corners area, and people traveled in both directions on it. Then, in 1882, Charles Hall, who had ferried the wagons across the river at the Hole in the Rock, discovered an easier crossing about thirty miles upstream and built a ferry there. Today, a modern ferry service carries vehicles across Lake Powell from Bullfrog to Halls Crossing.
In his impressive work on Bishop Jens Nielson, David S. Carpenter studied what happened to those initial settlers in the years following their arrival. The figures are revealing and give some clue as to the
difficulty of life there.
Among those who left within a short time after their arrival were those who either had never planned to stay, and went on to other locations, and those who had come only to help family members get settled. Mons Larson, for example, whose wife gave birth to a baby boy on Grey Mesa in a blizzard, went on to Snowflake, Arizona. This had been their intent from the beginning. Wilson Daily, the company blacksmith, a non-Mormon, went on to Colorado, as did the Box family, who had brought a large herd of horses to sell.
In June 1880, U.S. census takers made their way to the new little outpost and recorded the names of all present. This gives us a good picture of who was there just two months after their arrival. That initial census showed 193 settlers along the San Juan—107 at Bluff and 86 at Montezuma Creek. Ten years later, Bluff’s population had grown to 193 on its own.3 That figure has not changed much in over a hundred years. The population in 2007 was listed as 377.
A glimpse of what happened to the pioneers who played a part in the novel is indicative of the overall picture of what followed the company after their arrival in San Juan.
• Lemuel Redd, Sr., who was one of the four scouts who went to Montezuma Creek, returned home to New Harmony after getting his son settled.
• The Daniel Barney family (whose son Al was knocked into the Colorado River) were gone by June of 1880, possibly to Arizona.
• David and Sarah Jane Hunter and George and Alice Urie, two young couples without children, returned to Cedar City, leaving before June 1880. However, the Hunters were back in Bluff in 1884. (In the novel, Molly returns to Cedar City with them.)
• Bishop George Sevy, another of the four scouts, and his family returned to Panguitch before June 1880.
• Silas S. Smith, captain of the company, had moved to Manassa, Colorado (south of Alamosa), by the end of 1881.
• George Hobbs was gone by 1883 and eventually ended up in Nephi.
• Joseph Stanford Smith and his wife, Belle (who crow-hopped down the Hole) moved on to Mancos, in southwest Colorado, sometime before 1884.
• James and Mary Davis and family, who came with the exploring party in 1879, moved to Bear Lake, Utah, in 1884.
• Henry and Elizabeth Harriman, who also came with the exploring party in 1879, moved to Huntington, Utah, in 1884.
• Platte Lyman, captain of the company, left in 1884 for a time, but eventually returned. He was called as president of the first stake there. He and some family members are buried in the Bluff cemetery.
• Benjamin and Mary Ann Perkins and family, the Welsh coal miner, left in 1884, returned to Cedar City for a time, but eventually came back to San Juan and lived in Monticello. Both Ben and his wife are buried in the Bluff cemetery.
• Hyrum Perkins and his wife are buried in the Bluff Cemetery.
• Jens Nielson returned to Cedar City to get his other two wives and the rest of his family, then returned to Bluff. Jens died in 1906 and is buried in the Bluff Cemetery.
• Kumen and Mary Nielson Jones remained in Bluff with the Nielsons.
• Joe Nielson married Ida Lyman, sister of Platte D. Lyman, and remained in the San Juan area.4
Bishop Jens Nielson lived for twenty-six years in Bluff, serving as bishop for the second time for most of those years. Carpenter says of him and of his relationship with his San Juan home:
“Bluff was never far from failure during Jens Nielson’s life. . . . 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 . . . bound himself 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. . . . Regardless of others’ arguments, until the church’s leaders released him from Bluff, Jens Nielson would not go.”5
Albert R. Lyman shares a wonderful example of Bishop Nielson’s courage and his “stickity tootie.” About five years after their arrival, Amasa Barton was killed by two Navajos at his trading post down near San Juan Hill. Lyman writes that a short time afterwards, “a hundred Navajos rode into Bluff with faces painted black, carrying guns across their saddles in front of them and demanded to have somebody talk with them—quarrel with them—preliminary to the big row for which their hands were itching. The town had but three men in its borders, the rest being away on the range, on the road or somewhere else, and a helpless community of women and children took terrified account of the fierce looking army, peering out through curtained windows or through holes in the wall.
“Someone went in great haste for the bishop and he came limping readily forward to meet the painted danger. . . . Brother Kumen Jones was there ready to act as an interpreter, and through him the bishop began calmly to tell the Indians that it was not our business to fight, but to make and preserve peace. He stood unmoved there before them, his age, his white hair, his crippled feet indicating nothing of fear. It disturbed them, it contradicted their brave notion that they looked terrible, and that people should flee from their presence. Here was courage, dignity—and it disarmed them.
“Through his faithful interpreter, he told them if they wanted to talk things over to get down from their horses, stand their guns against the wall of the store, and come sit in a friendly circle on the ground. . . . He won them. They all dismounted. They all became friendly.
“Then to complete this movement for peace which he had been inspired to begin, he invited the Navajos to stay overnight. He had some of the people bring and butcher a fat steer, and they got bacon, coffee, flour, and other things from the store that these strangers might be well fed and return to be friends instead of enemies. They ate and remembered “Kagoochee”(crooked feet), and from that time forth, they were friends to him and his people.”6
This book is titled The Undaunted. The definite article is included in the title because the book is not as much about the quality of being undaunted as it is about a remarkable group of men, women, and children who exemplified that quality. Carpenter captures the essence of that astounding courage in a summary statement about the town of Bluff:
“Bluff is an unusually stubborn study in persistence. It reinforces the idea that even into the twentieth century, some Mormon pioneers were committed to religious ideals enough to deny themselves the American dream. But it was always a struggle. The town was settled in 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. . . . 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.’ What was said of the Sanpete settlements would easily be echoed further south: ‘Every man ought to marry a wife from San Juan because, no matter what happens, she’s seen worse.’”7
That was David Draper’s conclusion as well.
Notes
^1. See Miller’s list of participants in Appendix I (Hole, 142–47).
^2. See Albert R. Lyman, “Fort on the Firing Line” series; also his “Indians and Outlaws.”
^3. Carpenter, Jens Nielson, 237–445.
^4. Appendix B in ibid., 447–50.
^5. Ibid., 6–7.
^6. Lyman, “Bishop Jens Nielson,” 8–9. Kumen Jones also tells this story about his father-in-law (see Kumen Jones, “Navajo Peace,” 248–49).
^7. Carpenter, Jens Nielson, 416.
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