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Show El Vera and I had hardly settled into school when he hurried home one day, his blue eyes sparkling. He handed us a folder with a picture of a jolly Uncle Sam on the cover. Decked in blue star-spangled tophat and red and white striped jacket and pants, the lanky uncle flashed a toothy grin. He offered us a deep slab of Mother Earth. There it all was, a chubby Dutch colonial farmhouse embowered in elms and surrounded with fields of golden grain. "Landlocaters" had located virgin land in Southwestern Utah, a valley named the Escalante for the first white man to explore it. So if we should move there, we'd still keep links with the old Spanish tradition, through the name of Father Escalante and the railroad that ran to the Coast. Father reminded Mother that they had traveled the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake not long after it was built and when son Carlton was near birth. Fittingly a Utah senator, Reed Smoot, had given Congress leadership in getting the Enlarged Homestead Act passed. The new law doubled the size of the old 1862 homestead, 160 acres to 320. "The least we can do is look at it!" Father exulted, glowing with this irresistible sure thing. "They'll pay my railroad fare both ways, whether I locate there or not." Apparently Nash-Avery got cut rates for "prospects" on the fare, in harmony with a longstanding policy of Western railroads to encourage settlement along their lines. In less than a week he had returned more jubilant than when he went. He had something special to thrill each of us. The Escalante Valley-some benighted folk called it "desert" but they were dead wrong-lay broad and beautiful between two ranges of mountains. The vale was covered with sagebrush, the mountains sprinkled with evergreens. From recent rains and melted snows it was dotted with pools of water surrounded with blooming wildflowers, shrubs, rich June grasses. Near the foothills grazed wild horses in two's and three's and dozens, descendants of Spanish settlers' horses in California and New Mexico. Herds |