Where dry rivers meet: a palimpsest of the Pahvant Valley, Black Rock and Sevier deserts
| Title | Where dry rivers meet: a palimpsest of the Pahvant Valley, Black Rock and Sevier deserts |
| Publication Type | thesis |
| School or College | College of Humanities |
| Department | English |
| Author | Mace, Dylan J. |
| Date | 2012-08 |
| Description | The lands of the Great Basin are often considered to be bleak, empty places without history or stories. When I was fifteen, my grandfather led me on a short journey around the center of the Pahvant Valley, a relatively small portion of the Great Basin. Using this trip as a frame, I illustrate the complexity of the place, exploring the biologic, geologic, as well as human history of the area. Simultaneously, I work to show the importance of memory in the creation of attachment and appreciation of people to a specific place. |
| Type | Text |
| Publisher | University of Utah |
| Subject | Black rock desert; Deseret; Pahvant valley; Sevier |
| Dissertation Institution | University of Utah |
| Dissertation Name | Master of Science |
| Language | eng |
| Rights Management | Copyright © Dylan J. Mace 2012 |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Format Medium | application/pdf |
| Format Extent | 476,233 bytes |
| Identifier | etd3/id/3409 |
| ARK | ark:/87278/s6nc98g6 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/doi:10.26053/0H-FMMW-W300 |
| Setname | ir_etd |
| ID | 196973 |
| OCR Text | Show WHERE DRY RIVERS MEET: A PALIMPSEST OF THE PAHVANT VALLEY, BLACK ROCK AND SEVIER DESERTS by Dylan J. Mace A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Environmental Humanities Department of English The University of Utah August 2012 Copyright © Dylan J. Mace 2012 All Rights Reserved The Univers i ty of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF THESIS APPROVAL The thesis of Dylan J. Mace has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: R. Stephen Tatum , Chair 23 May, 2012 Date Approved Terry T. Williams , Member 23 May, 2012 Date Approved Marnie Powers-Torrey , Member 23 May, 2012 Date Approved and by R. Stephen Tatum , Chair of the Department of English and by Charles A. Wight, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT The lands of the Great Basin are often considered to be bleak, empty places without history or stories. When I was fifteen, my grandfather led me on a short journey around the center of the Pahvant Valley, a relatively small portion of the Great Basin. Using this trip as a frame, I illustrate the complexity of the place, exploring the biologic, geologic, as well as human history of the area. Simultaneously, I work to show the importance of memory in the creation of attachment and appreciation of people to a specific place. TABLE OF CONTENTS iii v WHERE DRY RIVERS MEET: A PALIMPSEST OF THE PAHVANT 107 PREFACE The seeds for this writing were planted very early in my life, probably before I can remember, during my first experiences in the Pahvant Valley and with my grandparents. Those memories are filled with warmth and love. However, those seeds were watered, actually, with anger. Some years ago, I encountered an article about Notch Peak which lamented how ugly the Pahvant Valley is, and how absolutely empty it is. I will concede that it is a stark, bleak land, but I see it as incredibly beautiful as well. Partly, this is because, from an aesthetic standpoint, the land seems to me to be like an extremely successful minimalist-abstract artwork. Its supposed minimalism and abstraction, on closer inspection, is revealed as complex and multilayered with subtle detail. I have loved this land as long as I can remember, and it continues to entrance and fascinate me as I have spent large amounts of time in the valley, looking at this landscape and moving across it, from the dusty soil to the sheer stone cliffs. I have also spent many hours studying maps of the area, thrilled by the almost blank spaces on them, in an era when you expect all the spaces to be filled. I have also studied aerial photos and satellite images of the land, following the traces of long dead rivers, abandoned towns, or modern roads and power- lines. Sometimes, I have made my own hand-drawn and painted maps of these places, and made artists books exploring these lands, so that I might understand the place from another perspective. vi Aside from its visual aesthetics, I am also familiar with many of the stories that How, I wonder, could a place be empty when it contains so much human experience? My own family has 160 years of history with the place and before them, other humans inhabited it for at least 10,000 years. The plants and animals, even the stones, have stories to tell. Some of these stories are hundreds of millions of years old. Traces of all of these stories remain, and can be retold. The other reason I was angered is that I took the complaint as a personal/family insult. My family has a long connection to the place, and I have conflated the two. It is not just the time my family spent there that lead to this conflation, but that the land and my ancestors, at least to my understanding, have come to resemble each other. For me, their lives, their names, their bodies and how they finally died, echo and mimic each other. WHERE DRY RIVERS MEET: A PALIMPSEST OF THE PAHVANT VALLEY, BLACK ROCK AND SEVIER DESERTS August, heat banging down hammer hard into the Great Basin. My brothers and I have come to stay with my grandparents, as we do every summer. On the day we arrived, men burned chaff and straw from their wheat fields. On that rarest of all times in the Pahvant Valley, a windless day, smoke rose straight into the atmosphere so that each column of smoke looked like a pillar holding up the sky. Not even a draft swayed or dispersed the smoke. It rose high enough into the sky that moisture on those pillars, thousands of feet above the valley floor. Windless, the wide open silence of the Pahvant Valley was not diminished by the rustle of leaves or whine of air through grass. An engine, a voice or the bark of a dog sometimes interrupted it, but only briefly. The quick vanishing of noise into that silence showed the bulk and strength of the quiet. My brothers and I quickly adjusted to the heat and silence, the sense of static they engender. This is the place we had come from, in a sense, and we were comfortable in it. I have never lived in the Pahvant Valley, but I am, nonetheless, intimately familiar with it, and feel that it is one of my homes. My father and grandfathers inhabited this valley 2 for five generations. Their histories and stories are woven into the basin so that I feel the whole land is family. History, anthropology, biology, are all cousins, related to me somehow, albeit distantly. This is the reason the silence does not bother me. It is the quiet of people at ease with each other, comfortable enough to not have to speak, because we already know each . Pahvant Valley is one of the individual basins making up the Great Basin, the region of the American west being pulled into a sprawling rift valley by tectonic forces. One theory as to why this is happening is because the Pacific plate rotates against the North American plate, shearing the edge of California away. This glancing collision stretches and fractures an area that encompasses all of the land between the Sierra Nevada on the west to the Colorado Plateau and Rocky Mountains in the east. As the land is pulled, the crust thins, valleys drop and mountains rise. Mountains erode. Valleys fill. The entire Great Basin is stretching over half an inch every year.1 Sometimes, this stretching makes gaps in running deep enough that magma wells up, a wound skin, and lava scabs on the surface. This particular basin, the Sevier Desert Basin, is bounded at a depth of 1.2 to 2.5 miles by a major detachment surface fault that gently dips westward at 3 to 4 degrees.2 This is the bedrock of the valley, deep down and sliding, slowly, west. Because 1 Sandy Eldredge, "Geologic Stretching," http://geology.utah.gov/teacher/tc/tc12-96.htm. 2 R. Ernest Anderson, Mary Lou Zoback, and George A. Thompson, "Implications of Selected Subsurface Data on the Structural Form and Evolution of Some Basins in the Northern Basin and Range Province, Nevada and Utah," Geologic Society of America Bulletin 94(1983). P 1065 3 of this low angle detachment, the Sevier Basin is spreading or opening, much more than it is subsiding or down-dropping,3 as many of the other valleys in the Great Basin are doing. The Pahvant Valley is somewhat arbitrarily divided into two deserts. The Black Rock Desert is in the southeast. It Sevier Desert arcs from the northeast to the southwest, widely encompassing its eponymous river and lake. The entire valley is a desert place in the classic sense; sparsely populated, dry, with little vegetation. Officially, these lands are semi-desert and desert. Most of the cropland, around which the relative few human inhabitants dwell, is located in semi-desert areas, on alluvial deposits and lake sediments. The soils are deep but have little organic development. In the 1800s, Captain C.E. Dutton described the land , which, under the scorching sun, is like ashes, except where the fields are made to yield their crops of grain by irrigation.4 He was writing about an area of the river further upstream, but his observations apply just as well to this location. The soil across the valley, except at the edges of mountains and mesas, is fine and light. Subsurface soils contain accumulations of calcium carbonates. They are alkaline, with Ph over 8.0. Where they are exposed, these lake deposited marls are as white and dusty as baking powder. The desert lands, by official definition, are similar to those classified as semi-desert, occurring on lake bottoms and terraces, alluvial fans and flood plains. However, they also tend to be saline as well. The natural vegetation growing in both areas is comprised of ricegrass, needle and thread grass, winterfat, black 3 Charles G. Oviatt, "Quaternary Geology of Part of the Sevier Desert, Millard County, Utah," ed. Utah Geological and Mineral Survey (Salt Lake City: Utah Department of Natural Resources, 1989). P 28 4 C.E. Dutton, "Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah," ed. U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880). P 170 4 greasewood, and shadscale.5 Russian thistle and halogeton, invasive species from the Asian steppes that thrive in overgrazed and disturbed environments, are now common as well. In spite the second largest lake in Utah, if measured by surface area. This contradiction between wet and dry is carried over to the name of the entire valley. Pahvant has two interpretati 6 7 Depending on the particular historic moment, either translation is applicable. eastern edge. The House Range makes the western border. Little is known of the first inhabitants of the Pahvant Valley, or more generally, of the Great Basin. They were hunters of prehistoric megafauna, and left a few Clovis and Folsom points in the area, especially around the margins of paleo-lakes.8 Near Skull Pass, in the House Range, a Clovis workshop was excavated. Judging by a variety of factors, this site has been estimated to range in age from 13,950 to 10,000 years old. Nearly one quarter of the material from this site consists of obsidian, which likely came from Topaz Mountain in the northern end of the valley, or sources in the Black Rock Desert. Sources for all of the materials besides the obsidian, including quartz, quartzite and chalcedony, can be 5 "Utah State Water Plan Sevier River Basin," ed. Natural Resources Division of Water Resources (Salt Lake City: Utah Board of Water Resources, 1999). P 3-13, 3-15 6 Leonard J. Arrington, The Price of Prejudice : The Japanese-American Relocation Center in Utah During World War Ii (Delta, Utah: Delta, Utah : Topaz Museum, 1997). 7 Josiah F. Gibbs, "Gunnison Massacre--1853--Millard County, Utah--Indian Mareer's Version of the Tragedy," Utah Historical Quarterly 1, no. 3 (1928). 8 Clovis points have not been found in any excavated cave sites. They pre-date any cave remains that have been found in the region. Folsom points are contemporary with the earliest excavated sites. 5 located nearby.9 This may indicate that people living in the valley at this time had enough resources at hand that they could remain in a relatively small area for extended periods of time. With post-glacial warming and drying of the region during the shift from the Paleocene to the Holocene, the area used a wide variety of adaptations and hunter-gatherer methods to maintain themselves until about 2,000 years ago. Throughout the post-glacial archaeological record, an arid environment, roughly similar to our current era, has existed. In spite of this, by roving across a variety of topographical ecologies, from high mountains to valley bottoms, people were able to procure enough resources to subsist. This early culture, as it is broadly understood, has been called the Great Basin Desert Archaic. Due to the variety of environments encompassed within the region, these people were able to hunt one of the widest varieties of mammals on the continent, including deer, pronghorn, mountain sheep and bison. Atlatls and throwing darts were the chief method of killing these animals, but the animals were not consistently procured. Small animals and birds, as attested by the archaeological record, were a more important source of meat than were the large game animals. Evidence suggests that large nets were used to capture jackrabbits, much as later historic Indians did. Even with the addition of smaller game, meat was a source of nutrition secondary to plant resources. Cave excavations have shown that these people utilized at least 68 species or genera of plants. Seeds of pickleweed, burrowweed and many others were consumed. The seeds and pollen of these, as well as saltgrass, greasewood, shadscale and sagebrush have been found in desiccated human feces, showing that they were consumed. Seeds were gathered in baskets, dried or parched by 9 William E. Davis, Dorothy Sack, and Nancy Shearin, "The Hell'n Moriah Clovis Site," Utah Archaeology 9, no. 1 (1996). P 55-69 6 tossing them with burning coals, then ground on milling slabs. Sparse representation of clothing in the archaeological record shows that clothing was simple and uncommon. The most common clothing is the robe or blanket, woven from twisted strips of rabbit hide, which is similar to that used by the historic people of the area. Technological and cultural changes continued to develop through this time. Toward the end of this period, 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, bows and arrows came into use, and a shift to higher elevation game resources was made. Finally, around 400-500 AD, pottery began to be manufactured, and horticulture becomes apparent.10 Following the Great Basin Desert Archaic, Fremont culture developed in the eastern Great Basin. There is a great deal of continuity from Desert Archaic to Fremont culture.11 However, sedentary lifestyle becomes apparent in the archaeological record, with people building small villages of wattle and daub adobe. The settlements were typically built on alluvial fans in intermontane valleys, close to rivers and marshes. Fremont homes were usually semi-subterranean, with rectangular, above ground storage structures. There is also record of temporary encampments beyond the village sites, presumably for hunting or gathering trips. Though corn was grown, it seems to have been a small, supplemental, portion to the diets of the Fremont people in the Sevier Desert region. Instead, a heavy reliance on cattails as a basic food item is evidenced. Other foods, such as coots and muskrats, were also collected by the Sevier Fremont from their marsh and river habitats. Coil-made grey ware, corner and side-notched arrow points, trough metates and a variety of 10 Handbook of North American Indians: Great Basin, ed. Warren L. d'Azevedo, vol. 11 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1986). P 149-160 11 Ibid. p 161- 7 bone tools were common. Genetic and cultural backgrounds for these people are unknown.12 Historically, the Pahvant Valley was an area where three seperate Numic tribal territories abutted each other: Utes, Paiutes and Goshutes. These tribes are members of the same language group, and have some overlapping cultural practices and beliefs. Of the various tribes inhabiting the Great Basin, Utes had the highest densities, concentrated near Utah Lake, along the Sevier River and in the Pahvant Valley. The Pahvant band inhabited the lands from the Wasatch Plateau, almost into present day Nevada, where they intermixed, to some extent, with the Goshute. Relations between Ute and Goshute have been described as amicable, and sometimes involved intermarriage.13 Traditionally, Ute clothing was different from that of their Paiute and Goshute neighbors. Women wore aprons of woven bark or fiber, as well as skirts and dresses of tanned leather. Other items of clothing were woven of sagebrush bark or tule fibers, especially poncho-like shirts. Men wore breechclouts, leggings and shirts of buckskin. In winter, skin blankets of rabbit, muskrat, marmot, badger, coyote and wolf were worn.14 The early Spanish explorer and Franciscan friar, Silvestre Velez de Escalante, who visited the area in 1776, described Pahvant men wearing a small piece of polished bone through the cartilage of their noses.15 They lived in houses made of willow, which were either domed or conical and covered in brush, bark or tule reeds.16 12 David B. Madsen, "New Views on the Fremont: The Fremont and the Sevier: Defining Prehistoric Agriculturalists North of the Anasazi," American Antiquity 44, no. 4 (1979). p 711-721 13 Handbook of North American Indians: Great Basin. p 338- 340 14 Ibid. p 345 15 Silvestre Velez de Escalante, "Pageant in the Wilderness: The Story of the Escalante Expedition to the Interior Basin, 1777. ," Utah Historical Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1950). p 189 16 Handbook of North American Indians: Great Basin. P 348 8 Pahvant Utes depended on all of the same resources as those exploited by the Fremont, but also fished, and had a variety of methods to do so, including fish arrows, wood or bone gorgets on lines, fish spears, weirs, nets and basket traps. They also cut holes in the winter ice to spear or shoot fish.17 Most Pahvant Utes were removed to the Uintah Reservation in Eastern Utah after white settlement. Some Pahvants remained on ancestral lands, but were eventually absorbed into the Southern Paiute tribe on the Kanosh and Koosharem settlements.18 Paiutes occupied the southern margins of the Pahvant Valley, and there has been confusion concerning which regional group belonged to which tribe. Southern Paiutes resembled Utes, with only an overlay of Plains traits to differentiate the Utes. Some confusion even arose within the groups themselves as to who was or was not a member of which group. Beaver Paiutes, who self identified as Paiutes, were considered to be Pahvant Utes by other Paiute groups. Relations between the two tribes were ambivalent. Historically, Utes raided Paiutes, capturing slaves. Evidence suggests that Paiutes were being captured and sold as slaves by Ute raiders as early as the late 1700s, and that this depopulated several Paiute areas, and limited their horticultural practices. However, Paiutes also adopted some Ute cultural practices, including the Bear and Sun Dances as well as adopting many styles of Ute dress.19 Paiutes practiced horticulture, either planting corn or encouraging the growth of other useful plants without actually tilling the soil or planting seeds. They primarily subsisted as hunter-gatherers, following an annual cycle across their territories to gather foods as they were available, much as earlier cultures had done. Because the environment 17 Ibid. p 342 18 Ibid. p 338-340 19 Ibid.p 368-386 9 they inhabited supported limited numbers of big game, Paiutes depended on rabbits, rodents and birds for meat. They also depended on rabbit fur for the bulk of their clothing. The majority of their diets came from gathered foods, especially piñon nuts and grass seeds.20 Both the Pahvant Ute and Beaver Paiute lived independently, without a reservation until 1929 when the Kanosh Reservation at the foot of the Pahvant Mountains, was officially recognized. This reservation was terminated in 1954, so that Federal support for medical, dental and social services was cancelled, and the reservation lands were parceled out to tribal members. By 1968, less than half of the lands which had comprised the reservation remained under ownership of native people. In 1980 the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah Restoration Act was signed into law, restoring federal support for the reservation, and funding acquisition of lands to compensate for lands lost due to termination.21 As of 2009, the Kanosh Band of Southern Paiute was comprised of only 132 members.22 There are conflicting accounts of interaction between Pahvants and Goshutes. They sometimes intermarried. Eastern Utes raided both Paiutes and Goshutes, capturing women and children to be sold as slaves. Some accounts state that Pahvants did not own horses at this time, and so were not able to conduct slave raids.23 However, other accounts state that Pahvant and Timpanogas Utes were involved in the slave trade, and took part in these raids.24 After Mormons arrived in Utah, the slave trade was stopped. Wars between 20 Ibid. p 373-375 21 Ibid. p 389-392 22 "Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah: Enrollment," Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, http://www.utahpaiutes.org/about/departments/tribalmemberservices/enrollment/. 23 Handbook of North American Indians: Great Basin. P 354 24 Carling Malouf, Shoshone Indians : The Gosiute Indians, ed. David Agee Horr, American Indian Ethnohistory (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1974). P 102 10 the Mormons and Timpanogas Utes forced some Utes to join the Goshutes as refugees. Some of these refugees eventually became leaders of Goshute resistance against whites.25 Goshute territory was sparsely populated, with fluid boundaries. In spite of a high incidence of intermarriage with their Ute neighbors, they maintained Shoshone culture. The majority of foods were procured by women, with a heavy focus on grass seeds and piñon nuts. A typical family could gather 1,200 pounds of nuts in autumn when the nuts were available. This supply would last the family about four months. Men hunted bighorn sheep and deer. Antelope were occasionally hunted and killed during communal drives that were organized by special Antelope Shamans, and were one of the few events where large numbers of Goshute came together. Area ecology limited the occurrence of these episodes however, because after a drive, a region needed several years for the number of antelope to rebound. Due to the small numbers of big game, the most important meat sources were rabbits and hares. Cottontails were typically trapped, but jackrabbits necessitated communal drives, when extended family groups came together in the autumn. At this time, they drove the animals into long nets and clubbed them to death. A variety of birds were captured, when available. Grasshoppers, crickets, bee eggs and larvae were also eaten.26 Clothing, among the Goshute, was relatively scarce. The most common article was, like members of other cultures in the region, the woven rabbit skin robe. Clothing made from the hides of deer, pronghorn or sheep was made when available. If skins were in 25 Ibid. p 110 26 Handbook of North American Indians: Great Basin. P 262-268 11 short supply, women wore skirts made of bark or grass. Men wore tailored clothing, but sometimes wore only a breechclout of skin or twined bark.27 Officially, Goshute no longer inhabit the Pahvant Valley. Their confederated reservation is located to the northwest, on the border of Utah and Nevada, centered around Ibapah. When white settlers arrived in the Pahvant Valley, in the area of present day Deseret, Oasis and Hinckley, several mounds, the remnants of prehistoric adobe habitations, were raised to level fields for planting. These mounds were never large, and were easily destroyed simply by plowing them over. Potsherds, broken stone implements and stone working debetage were found in the debris. At one site that was destroyed in 1916, the mounds were reported to be the remains of single room shelters, containing earthenware vessels, bone awls and stone balls. The pots were plain or corrugated, dull slate grey ornamented with black geometric designs.28 In 1851, Brigham Young decided that the Pahvant Valley should be settled by Mormon pioneers. It was decided that the capital of the territory should be placed in the area, as well. Autumn of that year, about 100 people moved from Salt Lake City to found the new capital of Utah, Fillmore.29 This is when my family first came to the area, when Hyrum and Elizabeth Mace helped settle the town. In 1859, the exploration of the western Pahvant Valley and settlement of Deseret were organized. Forty people moved to the area, built a dam, dug a canal and cleared land 27 Ibid. 28 Neil Merton Judd, Archeological Observations North of the Rio Colorado (Washington: Washington : Govt. Print. Off., 1926). P 61-62 29 Edward Leo Lyman, A History of Millard County , ed. Linda King Newell and Society Utah State Historical (Salt Lake City , Utah : [Fillmore]: Salt Lake City , Utah : Utah State Historical Society ; Fillmore : Millard County Commission, 1999). p 40-41 12 to farm northeast of Black Rock. By the end of 1861, 142 families lived in Deseret. The settlers depended heavily on fish from the Sevier River, catching them and salting them for storage. In 1861 and 1862, the irrigation dams washed out. With the second washout, many of the settlers abandoned Deseret and moved to various locations in the east of the county. In 1863, the dam washed out again. Nearly all of the remaining people moved away. The remnant of settlers then hauled rock from forty miles away to build a new dam, which lasted for four years.30 In 1868 the dam washed out again, and the town was abandoned.31 Between 1874 and 1875 an elaborate new dam was built and Deseret was settled once again.32 In the spring of 1882, a warm southern wind flooded the frozen Sevier River with spring melt. Masses of ice piled against the dam until it was overwhelmed and destroyed. Observers said that the earth shook from the grinding masses of ice.33 Of course, a new dam was built. My great-grandmother, Martha Eliason, moved to Deseret in 1879 with her Danish immigrant parents. She was four years old. first home in Deseret was a dug- out on the edge of the Sevier River, soon destroyed in a flood. In 1890 my great-great grandfather, James, Sr., moved his family from Fillmore to Deseret, opening a meat market and tannery. He built the family home across the road from his store. Deseret was more consequential then than now. The railroad passed through Oasis, directly east of Deseret, so the freight for all of the western communities, and mines in the western mountains all the way to Nevada, passed through town. Deseret also had two saloons and a dancehall. My great grandfather, James, Jr., twelve at the time, 30 Ibid. p 102-104 31 Ibid. p 132-133 32 Ibid. p 146 33 Ibid. p 161 13 assisted in butchering animals and delivering meat to people living at Swan Lake, Joy and mining camps in the Drum Mountains. Later, he also hauled silver ore from the Fish Springs and Drum mines back to the railroad, pulling the freight wagons with a team of six horses. Martha first noticed James in church, singing a hymn in duet. She worked at a store, so over the years the two became friends. In 1901 James proposed to Martha. They married on 25 March, 1903. In 1904 they moved from Deseret to Eureka, where James worked as foreman of timbermen at the Little Chief Mine, and Martha ran a green grocery out of the family home on Angel Street. When he and other communities in the Tintic Mountains, or he took odd jobs, such as knife sharpening. My grandfather often told the story of when his father was asked to sharpen all -tanner, James honed the blades razor sharp. When the miners finished their shift and came in to eat, each man sliced his meat, stabbed the bites with the tip of the knife and put the meat into his cut his lips. Out of pride and shame they said nothing to their friends in the way of warning, but left with bleeding lips and meals unfinished. Martin Doyle, my grandfather, was born. Though his first name was Martin, he always went by Doyle. The name Martin was almost a secret. I did not know until I was a teen that his first name was not Doyle. deteriorated due to his time in the mine, so the family moved back to Deseret. By wagon, it took three days to make the journey. care of her and James took care of her farm. 28 December, 1909, she died of pneumonia. 14 Around the same time, Doyle contracted spinal meningitis, nearly died and was confined to bed for weeks. When he finally recovered, he had to learn again how to walk. returned home. James also worked on various farms on a share basis. In 1910, he was able to buy his own farm. He continued to work other jobs, freighting in the winter when there was little to do on the farm, working at a sawmill near Gandy and helping plough and harvest other farms when the help was needed. My grandfather inherited the same habits of hard work. In 1933 he began working at the Nicholsen Seed Farm and Ranch. Helping with irrigation, and the rahe was paid $50 a month. James often accompanied him because the family cattle were on the same range. Doyle rode, and James managed the chuckwagon. During this time, my grandfather broke and trained horses, and built his own herd of cattle. His horses were well trained. He sold one for use as a polo pony. Many others were sold as cutting horses, while another horse was sold to the army. With the proceeds from that sale, he was able to buy ten head of heifers to add to his herd. My great-great-grandfather built this home when the family first came to Deseret. Later, he moved away and sold it. In 1921 my great-grandparents bought the house, bringing it back into the family. They raised seven children here. My grandparents raised three more here later; my father, aunt and uncle. It is a strong house, still sturdy after 100 years and a few floods. Elms grow around it. A cedar grows outside the front bedroom window. In the back bedroom, where my father slept as a child, where my brothers will sleep tonight, my grandmother keeps a pile of clothing. Old dresses, blouses, shirts and pants are neatly folded, waiting to be cut into squares, sewn together, made into new quilts. 15 She has firm opinions about everything, quilting included. Tied quilts are a travesty, their makers guilty of an almost moral failing. Quilts are stitched. Each stitch is precisely the same measure as the one before it. Outside the window, behind the house, is the root-cellar. Next to the cellar is a tree stump, all that remains of a cottonwood that grew here long before the house or the town existed. Its shade was probably the reason the house was built here. It must have been a massive tree. Two men could barely wrap their arms all the way around the barkless, weathered bole. Six feet up, the tree is sawed off flat. A pile of steel-jaw traps are thrown there. Some are small, coyote sized. Most are bigger, for wolves and mountain-lions. They are rusty, triggers missing, springs cracked, unused for decades. The red-black rust makes them look blood soaked and scabbed. Massed on their weather whitened and cracked pedestal, they are a monument to a previous era, of taming and domination, an attempt to make this place into a different land. The cellar is like a bunker. The walls are thick, built of hand-mixed, hand-poured concrete. Creosoted timbers hold up the roof, loose alluvial soil covers them, to block the winter cold and summer heat. In spring, foxtails and cheat grasses, some Russian thistle, sprout there as the snow melts. They quickly die. Logs, sawn and split for the fireplace, are stacked along the wall. A pickup-load of coal is heaped next to it. The door to the cellar is put together out of planks, salvaged from the granary at the farm. Sheets of worn carpet are tacked over it for insulation. Opening the door, I notice the smell and the temperature at once. In the summer, it is cool. In winter it feels warm. temperature drops, sometimes to ten or twenty below zero, a kerosene lamp is left burning in the center of the dirt floor to keep the cold from getting in. Then, of course, it smells thick with kerosene smoke, but more often, it smells of moist, lightless, soil. No matter what else the cellar 16 contains, this scent is there. Depending on the season, there was the scent of potatoes, tomatoes, squash, cabbage, carrots.... My grandparents kept the carrots in a big box full of sand. When my father went to the cellar to get them, he thrilled at the carrot smell, ran his spread fingers through the cold grit, finding the roots. The smells of all those vegetables, combined with the soil scent, was thick and musky, like a big and rare animal, lurking in its den. Now though, they rarely keep vegetables here. Shelves are empty, save a few bottles of peaches and pears in syrup that we eat for supper with a slice of bread. The well-house sits just east of the cellar. It is small and painted white, resembling a bee-hive, only shorter and wider. Next to it is a pipe, capped by an old can. With a long pole that he dips into the pipe, my grandfather measures the amount of water they have in the well. Near the well, there is an irrigation ditch. Along its side, is a tangled hedge of purple-skinned, yellow-fleshed plums. The trees produce fruit erratically. Some years they are bare. Most years, they have just a few lone fruits. Then, there are years the trees look like they will pull themselves down under the weight of their bounty. My grandparents cannot pick all the fruit, so the ground is littered with fermenting, vinegar scented fruit. Beyond the cellar, the well and the ditch, is the granary. The building is like a Hollywood set façade. The south and west of the building burned away last year. I open the door of the building for the feeling of absurdity and vertigo that comes from looking into a structure that I knew to be solid (even though there were holes in the roof that let leaves and elm seeds settle to the floor and pile in layers, stratified like the layers of soil that fill this whole valley basin) until a year ago. The building was filled with mysteries, old saddles with cracked leather, a rusty .30.30 without a stock. Now, when I open the door, there are singed elms and an old corral. This land is so dry that the hay, straw and shit of seventy years 17 remains uncomposted in the corral, a foot thick concretion of vegetable fiber, an impenetrable mulch suppressing even Russian thistle growth. Beyond the corral is a cornfield, a tangled grove of Russian olives, Black Rock. The whole world, receding into the distance, has replaced the back wall. My grandfather keeps a galvanized water-trough behind the garage. In summer, when we come to visit, he rolls it to the front of the house and fills it with water. We wallow in it to escape the heat, until our lips turn blue. Grandma makes us get out of the water, come in the house and eat There are certain foods I will always associate with my grandparents and their home: peaches and pears bottled in syrup, pine nuts, root-beer floats and the dinner we eat tonight. After dinner we have honey on bread for desert. The five gallon bucket of honey is kept on the floor of the pantry. The vessel is never drained, usually mostly full, and mostly crystallized. Sometimes, rings mark the walls of the bucket like stepped shorelines of a receded lake. When I was younger, like conspirators, my grandfather and I would go down the hall to the pantry. I had a table spoon and a tea-cup, or a pint jar. He pulled the bucket out, pried its lid up. Previously, a pit had been dug in the center of the amber crystals. Into the bottom of this well, a little liquid honey had accumulated. I scooped it out, into the container. Now my grandfather took over. He gouged chunks of hardened honey out until the jar was mostly full. We returned to the kitchen, placed the container into a pan of hot water on the stove, and melted the honey. I licked the spoon clean. When the honey was melted, we drizzled it onto dark crusted, home-made, bread. Evening, the sun is setting. South and west, thunderheads swell into the sky, white in the last angled rays of the sun, anvil topped, draping virga in a false promise of moisture. The storms bring only lightning, catching fire to sagebrush, greasewood, juniper and cheat- 18 grass. Strong winds fan the flames. The sky is dirty grey, horizons foreshortened, sunset the color of iodine. All the smoke in the air makes it look as though the whole of the White Rocks, Indian Peaks and Wah Wah Mountains are burning, as well as the Hamlin and Pine Valleys between them. Cheat-grass ash falls from the sky, black and whole as if entire blades of grass were lifted into the sky and burned there instead of on the ground. The ash sticks to spider webs on the outside of the white house. Speckle-breasted starlings, black feathers shimmering metallic purple green, sit in the Siberian elms north of the house, chattering and whistling. They run through their -deer, kill-deer, kill- like magpies, call like quails and honk like geese before returning to their own chirps, gurgles and whistles. Sometimes, I wonder if the calls of starlings, the ones that we think of as their own, are the sounds of some extinct bird that we no longer remember. Elm leaves, blown from trees by strong gusts of wind, curl in the grass. They litter the sidewalk, crunch when stepped on, like dry brittle eggshell. It is dark now. Lightning is distant, thunder reaching us long after the flash, grumbling rather than roaring. The humming mercury vapor bulb makes a pool of blue light in the darkness. Cutworm moths, green lacewings, sunflower beetles, speed around the lamp, electrons around a nucleus. Beating themselves against hot glass, dizzied, stunned, they fall. Wally waits for them. A he biggest I have ever seen, he comes here every night, watching with his golden eyes for the choicest, fattest insects to fall. Even at night, the heat is a physical presence, an enormous weight crushing everything beneath it. Inside the house it is a little cooler than out, but windows and doors 19 are open to the relative cool of early morning, to let it in as soon as it arrives, while we are sleeping. Now though, I lie awake and too hot. A semi passes down the road, on the highway. A pick-up pulls out, driven by a man on his way to irrigate fields. A dog barks, bored, half-hearted. Insect sounds come through the screens. Up and down the road, bug-zappers make long electric rips scorching moths and beetles. Field Crickets sing loudly, manic, fiddling hard, throbbing an anxious rhythm to the heat. Angle-winged katydids, secreted in elms and cottonwoods, tick like intricate machines, clocks measuring time in a way we do not understand, rushing and pausing, adding and subtracting seconds, making minutes that were not there before, or pausing to let previous times catch up. A field cricket has found its way into the kitchen, hidden behind the cabinets or the refrigerator. Cooler than the crickets outside, it does not match their rhythm, sounds slow and confused, out of time and discordant. Each night we try to catch it. We move things, wait for it to call again, but we can never find its hiding place. During the day we pull the refrigerator away from the wall, vacuum beneath it again, clean out the cupboards, rewash and restack pots, pans and pie plates. My grandmother loathes that insect for entering her home, damns it every time it makes a sound. I shift in the thick cotton sheets, sweaty, sticking to the stiff fabric. Their laundry closet scent faintly lingers, scent of cotton bedding left in darkness for months, incomparable to any other smell, musky perfume of rest. I breath it in deeply, fall asleep. When I wake, my grandfather is sitting at the end of the grey formica table in the dining room. Freshly shaven, wearing thick-rimmed reading glasses, he prepares to put his contacts in, spreads the towel, places the mirror on it. Carefully, he puts the tiny bowls on his pale blue eyes. 20 He is lit by early morning sun shining through closed roller-blinds and dense curtains. After passing through these barriers, it is still bright, golden, bonfire hot. He, and the room around him, glows. He is quiet and reserved, and always has been. In twenty years, I will find a mention of him in a New York Times article, from a story from 1947 on what westerners thought of western films. -year old Deseret 34 He is old now, in his eighties, but still taciturn, tall and smiling. Even in diminution, winding down of old age, he is powerful. His fingers are thumb thick. His chest is broad, back straight. The thin cotton undershirt he wears reveals a web of white scars punctuated with rust marks, from an accident sixty years before while breaking a horse. His work was almost done. The horse was calm and gentle, used to bit and saddle, used to being ridden. Sometimes he got a little skittish, but settled down easy enough with a palm on his neck and calming words. A potential buyer was coming to see the horse, so my grandfather wore a new shirt to look his best. He was in the saddle when the horse spooked, bucked and would not stop, until my grandfather was thrown onto a barbed-wire fence. His boot caught in the stirrup. The horse ran down the fence, dragging my grandfather down the wire, barbs tearing through flesh, sawing through bone. He did not bleed to death or die of infection in that time before antibiotics. He lifts his long-sleeved shirt from the back of the chair, puts it on, snaps it closed, tucks the tails in. His skin is paler than it was when my father was young. The sun no longer has the time to burn his hands and face black as he looks after his cattle, irrigates or cuts the fields. The history shows though, in the creases of weather made wrinkles. 34 Jack Goodman, "Love That Wild West," New York Times , July 13 1947 1947. 21 My grandmother pulls eggs and bacon from the fridge, making the decision for all of us. The granddaughter of a Prussian war hero, she is always poised and firm, in control and unflappable. My grandparents met each other July 4th 1941, when my grandmother, Martha, came to younger sister. The two women had become friends while on a mission together. A month after he met her, my grandfather visited her in Salt Lake City, took her out to dinner and a dance. She in turn took him to meet her parents in Hanna. In the fall of that year, my grandmother took a position with the Ordnance Department and moved to Fort Lewis, Washington then Fort Winfield Scott in San Francisco, California. My grandparents exchanged presents through the mail. When she visited Salt Lake on vacations, my grandfather met her there. Finally, in 1946, Martha visited Doyle in Deseret and he proposed. They drove to Salt Lake to purchase rings and she returned to San Francisco to quit her job and collect her belongings. She returned to Deseret on December 1st. She and Doyle then drove to Hanna, purchasing Jan 1st, 1947. By the time they married, all of my great aunts and uncles had moved away from Deseret. My grandparents settled into the town just down the road from my great grandparents, and my grandmother quickly made herself as much a member of the community as her husband or parents-in-law. She gets to work frying bacon. With two canning rings, she cooks my eggs sunny side up in perfect rounds. Everyone gets their eggs cooked to order, while my grandfather slices the bread he baked last night, crust dark and flaky, inside moist and soft. All of his life he has baked bread, like his father before him. He is good at it, making perfect loaves. He 22 also slices fresh tomatoes into thick slabs. Their pink juice fills the bottom of the plate, green yellow seeds freckling it. We sit as far from the hot window as we can while we eat. In spite of the heat, we drink coffee, black, thick and acrid, having percolated since my grandfather first got up. The pot has been gurgling on the counter top for the last two hours. No milk edges. randfather says, scooping a teaspoon of apricot jam onto his bread. ou comfortable driving, if After breakfast, I wash the cheatgrass ashes from home. Then, nervous, I back the blue Chevrolet out of the garage. It is a farm garage, big as a barn, with a concrete floor, walls and roof of prefabricated steel. The sun makes it into an oven, beating down on the steel, filling its space dense with heat. I drive the blue Chevrolet down the road, turn left, south on 257. My twice-great grandparents, the Eliasons, used to live on this corner. It is the corner where my uncle Jim kicked my dad out of the moving truck as he made the same turn that I do now. My father grasped and . Inside the car it smells of ozone, my aftershave and silt. Everything in the Pahvant Valley smells of silt. The river is laden with it and runs tons of it into the valley, even in drought years. Wind dries it, blows it about, into everything. Curlycup gumweed verges the road, just beginning to bloom. We drive past fields of wheat, corn and alfalfa. The wheat is golden, ready to be harvested. Corn is rich dark 23 green. Breezes make its long grass leaves flutter like a combination of water ripple and the mirage and heat shimmer. The alfalfa fields are the most variable. Some are freshly cut, stems raked into windrows for drying and bailing. Others, not yet cut, are a richer, darker green than the corn. They seem out of place for this dry hot land, but originating in the near east and central Asia, this is a habitat they do well in. Other alfalfa fields are going to be harvested for seed, rather than to feed livestock. They are grown out and scruffy. The flower stems are gangly and covered in small purple blooms. There are four kinds of birds that you almost always see when you drive out here: meadow larks, mourning doves, horned larks and magpies. They all make their appearance this morning. We come to the fort. In 1865 Nuchu, a Ute leader who the Mormons called Black Hawk, started an insurrection to take back Ute lands. In the same year, various Ute tribes were brought together to meet with O.H. Irish, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Brigham Young and various other authorities of the Mormon Church, in Spanish Fork, near where Mormon pioneers had massacred the Timpanogos Utes in 1851. The intent of this meeting was to pressure the tribes to vacate their homelands, and settle on the Uintah Ute reservation in Eastern Utah. With a combination of threats and promises, all of the bands, with the exception of the San Pitch, agreed to move to the reservation. The Pahvants did not leave their homes until 1869, and stayed on the reservation for only a short while before many returned home. After the Spanish Fork meeting, raids on Mormon owned livestock by Nuchu and his followers increased. Pahvants, who had previously had good relations with people in Deseret, also began to steal livestock. The men of Deseret were organized into a 24 militia and ordered to build a fort, which they constructed in June of 1865. The fort is square. Each side is 550 feet long. Ten foot tall corner bastions were located on the northeast and southwest corners. At their bases, the walls were three feet thick, tapering to one and one half feet thick at the top.35 In spring of 1866, Nuchu, and seventy-two Snake Valley Utes, Pahvant Utes and Goshute warriors appeared in Deseret. Four Deseret men met with Nuchu, promising to give him and his men as many cattle as they needed, so long as Deseret was not attacked. Otherwise, they would fight. Nuchu agreed to the proposal.36 The fort is melting back into the earth now. The bastions are gone, collapsed to the ground and growing weeds. Tops of the walls have worn down. A good push would probably topple a wall. The landscape the fort once occupied has changed as well. When it was built, the fort was on the banks of the river37, but the river now flows north and west of here. This old riverbed has been converted into an irrigation ditch, its banks lined with concrete to conserve water. In a few years, the fort will be partially rebuilt. A new bastion will stand on the northeast corner. The walls of the rebuilt fort will be lumpy and leaning. We do not stop at the fort, but continue on. Ahead and to the left, if we crossed the train tracks we would enter the old dump that was closed when stricter hygiene laws were passed. Scattered in the brush is the debris of 100 years of settlement, as if an antique 35 Lyman, A History of Millard County. 36 Lyman, Edward Leo. A History of Millard County. Edited by Linda King Newell and Society Utah State Historical. Salt Lake City , Utah : [Fillmore]: Salt Lake City , Utah : Utah State Historical Society ; Fillmore : Millard County Commission, 1999. 109-111 37 Isgreen, Marilyn Corah. "Holocene Environments in the Sevier and Escalante Desert Basins, Utah : A Synthesis of Holocene Environments in the Great Basin." Thesis (M.S.)--Dept. of Geography, University of Utah, 1986., 1986. Pg 28 25 shop had been floating across the valley hundreds of feet above the ground when it exploded, raining its shattered contents to the desert floor. The soil, over there, is mosaiced with broken crockery, glass (green, purple, blue, brown, clear but rainbowed with age), rusted through steel cans, and metal oddments the color of volcanic stone. There are remains of furniture, a bed post or cabinet, already broken but now warped and cracked by the weather to near annihilation. There are a few more unusual items as well, like half of the head of a porcelain doll, or a rusted meat clever. I ask. The farm is where most memories are nested, where stories and sensations have accumulated deepest. More than the house where my grandparents live, it is the anchor connecting me to this region. My grandfather iately. He pauses or your brothers I remember him, casually I thought, asking if I might ever want to farm. I imagined my grandfather would live forever. The farm would always belong to him, so I hemmed Now I feel my answer betrayed him. Just past the dead cottonwood, before the highway angles west along the Union Tires crunch on the gravel road as we drive west toward the farm. Meadow larks, with heavy yellow breasts, sit on strands of barbed wire, lean forward, ready to throw themselves into flight as we come closer. We drive fast, keeping the dust cloud behind us. In the low spots, where ruts have accumulated windblown soil, our tires explode the dirt back into the sky. 26 Flocks of white-faced ibis, in Vs, Ws and strings of bobbing, flapping birds, move from one irrigated field to the next, gathering insects from the wet stubble of cut alfalfa. Individual birds move briskly across the sky. In my memories the farm is distant, as if I have to traverse half the valley to reach it, but suddenly there are the two cottonwoods, standing together like a gate, the entrance to a separate realm. They are like a gate because, to enter the farm, we pass to the west or east of them, not between them. They are slowly dying. In twenty years, the western tree will still have a few living twigs, sprouting leaves that flutter green and silver in the wind, but the eastern tree is almost dead now. Its trunk is hollow and rotting out. Its crown is bare. Just a few spots of foliage, low down the tree, show that it is still alive. When the other tree is still managing to put out new growth, this one will finally be dead, the bark falling away in great slabs. The bole will be filled with bees, a feral swarm filling its rotten innards with honey. I turn slowly onto the two-track so that I do not accidentally scrape the juniper post holding the barbed-wire fence up. Just in front of us is the third cottonwood. It lies next to the blew do of its branches remained alive. It is covered in green leathery leaves. Of the three trees on this part of the farm, it is the most vital. The trees show that the river flowed here. They stood on its bank. On the other side of the road that we just came in on, the ditch follows the curve of the old channel. Aerial photos reveal oxbows and meanders of riverbed etchings, at least three tracing across this particular place that only has a circumference of one and a half miles. 27 I think of the farm settlement and change over the last 150 years. It is a palimpsest as well, revealing layers of time marked on the land. At the southern end, where we enter, I find the most evidence of humanity. Some is visible, some resides in the memory of my grandfather. There is the corral. Its posts are juniper trunks and railroad ties. One big post is necklaced with hundreds of strands of baling wire. Thick slabs of milled, off-cuts and pine planks are bolted and nailed onto the fence, making a palisade strong enough to contain mustangs until they were tame. The wood is weathered, leaden silver grey. Fibers are softened and feathered until the surfaces of the old boards are soft as cotton fabric. It has been ten years since the corral held calves, even longer for horses. It is accumulating tumbleweeds. Nails holding it together are coming loose. My grandfather trained many horses here. Breaking horses was more than just a way to make extra money, or supply himself with new horses. Men who could train horses had a higher status, in some ways, than run of the mill farmers and ranchers. They were able to capture something wild, and without destroying it, make it into something tame and useful but still powerful. It also meant sustaining himself and his family during difficult times. In 1929 the Oasis Bank, where the family kept its savings, went broke. My grandfather was able to sell one of his horses for 35 dollars and keep his parents solvent until new money came in. Disused farm equipment is scattered about. Nothing has been discarded. The narrow economic margins farmers inhabit necessitate their never getting rid of anything. The ability to cannibalize old equipment to keep a newer tool functioning may mean financial survival instead of bankruptcy. So, an old chassis, stripped entirely bare, lies a few 28 feet away and half buried. These are antiques, mostly, left over from when these fields were worked with horses. Near the elm hedge, the troughs my great grandfather made still lie on the ground. They are burned out logs, reinforced with barrel hoops to keep the wood from swelling and shrinking with seasons, splitting open and spilling their buckets of water. In spite of these reinforcements, long decades have cracked and twisted them, made the wood soft, filled the basins with detritus. My grandfather tells about a jack-ass he once owned. When the animal drank from the troughs he put his face into the water. Suddenly, his belly swelled and the water level in the trough dropped an inch or more. A darkling beetle, what we call a stink bug, determinedly makes its way across a bare patch of soil. Its abdomen is as big as the end of my thumb, and held aloft on spindly legs. Its feet leave marks like stitches on the fine soil. Some things are gone. I never knew them, but as my grandfather speaks, he sees as it was fifty, or even eighty years ago and tells me. Here, near the troughs, is where his automobile, a Model T, James still hitched up his wagon, packed a lunch and spent his days at the farm, tinkering in his shop. He worked metal scraps into useful tools: long bolts whose threads were stripped became hay hooks; worn rasps were made into drawknives. One year, he traded tools to a Goshute family for a fifty pound sack of piñon nuts. My grandfather fondly remembers the winter of that year, eating pine nuts by the fist-full. There is where the granary was. My father and Jim tore it down when they were my age. It was the home my grandfather lived in, in 1914. It had a concrete floor and cabin walls made of railroad ties. After it was abandoned as a home, it was used as the granary for the farm for decades. During the three summers before they moved into the 29 granary, the family lived at the farm in tents. In winters, they rented spare rooms in Deseret. Later they bought the Mud Temple, an adobe, four-room house a little south of here, between the farm and Black Rock. Even after his parents bought the house where he lives now, my grandfather continued to live a less than rooted life. He worked for many years at the Nicholson Seed Farm, and lived there, sometimes, in a house he was provided with. He also ran his own cattle, and the cattle owned by the seed farm, so that he spent long periods living in a chuckwagon northwest of here, at Long Ridge. We follow the road further into the farm, going along where it and the ditch straighten out, run due magnetic north, where the burrowing owls lived in the cottontail warren. When I was still an only child, I sometimes went to the farm with my grandfather and parents, to pick asparagus or check on calves. If my grandfather saw an owl, he stopped and pointed it out to us. The four of us, packed in the cab of the truck, craned to see the birds. I was incredulous. Birds lived in trees. How could a bird live in a burrow, especially these? How could they get themselves down a hole with those gangly legs? The fields are all planted to alfalfa now. In years past, they were wheat. I remember thick clouds of pungent brown smoke, blowing off the burning wheat-stubble. The wind shifted, blowing the smoke back at us, so that my grandfather became a silhouette. My eyes burned. I coughed. Once, I lost sight of my grandfather entirely, when he had gone to light a back-burn. The panic I felt then still swells up inside me at the memory. Or, I remember the dust and grain scent billowing from the combine as it cut the stalks, threshed the wheat and blew the chaff and straw into flaccid windrows. In spite of the dust, the raw grain smelled delicious. Cutting grain, my father once assured me, was the worst task on a farm, a petty curse. It is done at the height of summer, in the hottest 30 weather. Chaff covers your body, sticking to your sweat, making you itch. Dust, which has accumulated on the grass stems of the grain all summer, comes free when cut. It sticks to your sweat, rivulets of mud coursing down your face and neck. Worst of all, he assured me, you invariably hit a skunk. The stink clings to you for days. This land contains the blood of my family. Not blood spilled in war or murder, but the blood of labor and intimate relation. It is the result of the brutality that farming brings My grandfather had other injuries besides being dragged down the fence by the horse. The distal phalange of one of his thumbs was split in half, lengthwise, from the time he and his father built a small irrigation dam. He steadied wooden pilings while his father the pole. Hurriedly, he put it back, accidentally putting his thumb on top of the rod when the mallet came down. His thumb, he said, looked like a plum, deep blackish purple and swollen tight. The next day, he was training a horse who began to buck. His thumb hit the horn of the saddle and ruptured. He says it gave him the most intense feeling of relief he has experienced in his life. On another occasion, his hand was badly cut when cleaning a jam from his hay bailer. The engine was off, the mechanism disengaged, but there was still tension in it when he pulled the tangled stems out. He and the doctor both lost count of the stitches it took to close the wounds. Months after the injury, stitches still surfaced through the scars on his hand. My great grandfather cut one of his toes off in a scything accident. It was sewn back on, but crooked. For decades it annoyed him, catching when he put his socks on, rubbing 31 uncomfortably when he walked. Eventually, with a hammer and cold chisel, he went out to the woodpile behind the house, put his bare foot on a log round, and took the toe back off. James was also kicked, square in the chest, by a draft horse, once. The horse was dozing when he slapped its ass. It st put a full day of work in, my grandfather says about his father. My great-uncle Blaine lost a finger when he was a child, topping sugar beets here, in the days when sugar brought momentary prosperity to the region finger was reattached, but crooked. The doctor tried straightening his finger, removing it to sew it back on straight, but the second surgery killed the finger. It did not knit. Finally, my uncle Jim nearly lost an eye when he and my father were feeding cattle, throwing hay to the animals with pitchforks. Jim stepped in front of my dad as he swung the tool around. A tine stabbed into his lower eyelid. Later, my father wished he had ss in one eye would have saved Jim from being drafted. Of course, the farmer is not the only one to feel this brutality. The soil is stripped bare, brush grubbed out and burned to make way for crops. The soil is graded, plowed. Plants are cut, bound and threshed. Predators are exterminated because they might kill the livestock. Burning weeds out of a ditch, my grandfather was once attacked by a rabid badger. He pinned it to the ground with a pitchfork and ran for the shovel. Each time he let go of the pitchfork handle, the animal pulled the tines out of the soil and chased after him. My grandfather grabbed hold of the handle each time, pinning the animal to the ground again. This went on the forty feet it took him to reach the shovel. He finally killed the badger by hitting it over the head with the shovel blade. 32 My twice great-grandfather, James Sr., had a team of wolfhounds. They were huge animals, long-limbed, like a colt more than a dog. He used to course with them. They hunted jack-rabbits and cottontails for sport and food, something to distract from the tedium of domesticity. When chores were done, James rode out into the desert with the dogs. They were tense and alert. This was not sport. James was sharp-eyed. Mounted on the horse he had a great vantage but his hounds spotted coyotes and wolves before he did. In a burst of dust, the dogs ran at some distant point. James followed their trajectories to where a grey or tawny shape suddenly became alert to the danger, startled, ran in panic. Even the long- snapped, shaken to death by whichever dog reached it first. At some point James stopped killing wolves and coyotes. Wolves were almost extirpated by this point. The last of them were hunted out, trapped and poisoned by men who were professional killers, with vendettas against the animals. James hounds grew old and died. He did not replace them. their ears and let them go again. I wonder if, in a sense, he was researching the animals. Notching their ears, he could estimate their age when he saw them again, or he could learn their range. Or, perhaps, he realized killing coyotes was a war of attrition that could not be won. He continued along in the habit he was raised with, but avoided that final act of killing, knowing it had no purpose. Carnivores were not the only wild animals to be killed. In summer, rabbits decimated the alfalfa fields. Squatting together in clusters, they gnawed the plants to the ground. The alfalfa looked like a moth-eaten sweater, soft and lumpy with empty places father and uncle raked a beam of light across the fields. Where eyes shined back, they 33 fired. Taking turns, one held the light while the other unloaded the .22s. One was a single shot, the other held fifteen bullets. Crack. The hollow-tipped bullet blew through the glowing eye, the brain, into soft soil behind the animal. Knocked by the bullet into a sideways somersault, the animal landed and twitched for a few seconds, nerves cross-wired and confused. Then, whoever was shooting traded guns. The gun that held fifteen rounds felt more delicate. The pump action, levering the spent casings out and a fresh bullet into the chamber, sounded like a snapping twig. In the darkness, it was a little more difficult to line up the sights. flopping around, squealing until it was shot again. This father taught himself to shoot doves in the dark, targeting whistling wings and weeping calls. Cottontails were dressed. Jacks were left where they died, a taboo in the family against eating their flesh. Coyotes would find them by scent of blood if not by squeal. If ens did when the sun rose. We continue on. The concrete lined irrigation ditch edges the right hand of the road, alfalfa on the left. One evening, my father and grandfather were irrigating. The sun was down, barely any light left. In the twilight, they saw indistinct movement along the edge of the full canal. As they watched, the shape came closer, became a little girl, a four-year- old who lived down the road f picked her up, called the names of her parents, but no one answered. They took her to her home. Her family had not gone looking for their daughter, had notified no one that she was missing, leaving her to wander miles into the desert along an irrigation ditch. 34 Three more cottonwoods stand ahead of us marking the shore of another old riverbed. For years, the jumbled bones of a dead cow lay among these trees. I used to wait in the shelter of the trees when my grandfather irrigated. I passed the time by arranging the bones in the order I thought they should lay. There was no skull, so the pelvis, with its wide round holes, stood in for it. The bones were cracked. I handled them delicately to avoid slivers. When I tired of bones, I gathered blown down oriole nests, and tried making my own. I did not have the skill of the birds though. My grandfather told me about the golden eagles that nested here until another was sure they would kill his calves. My father also sheltered here when my grandfather irrigated. Sometimes he heard words. In the stag-antler dead crown of the tallest the flow of the Milky Way, spilling it, pouring through the sky. He watched the nest, thought he saw the golden birds stirring, eager for dawn, hungering for lanky jackrabbits. If he could have reached the first limb, he could have climbed to the birds, tamed them, flew across the land on their backs, over the horizon straight into the glare of the sun as it rose. Or, he could have climbed to the ends of the limbs, into the clear night, gone tip-toe hopping on stars, to the moon. It was a wet moon, horns pointing up. Must have been cool in the cup of the moon. No mosquitoes. Could have slept there all night, until his father was done in the fields and they went home. He lingered in the tree shadow, watched breeze-sway of oriole nests on limb tips, like drips about to fall. Pushed hands into crevices of tree bark. Hugged the tree, fingers 35 found purchase, pulled himself up the trunk. His slick soled shoes slipped. Moving to the shortest tree, the one dividing into three trunks, he scrambled into the lowest of the forks, looked into leaves and branches, gave up climbing, moved to the bee-hives tangled in tree shadow. Ran palms across galvanized steel tops, paint chipping from them. Crouched on knees, breathed sweet hive scent, pressed his ear against a hive, heard hum and whine, pulled away from the sound, like a million particles about to burst apart. like a cough, an exclamation, a h the tarp. You can away, like a poorwill, into the dark down the dirt road, feet scuffing, to his father holding the flashlight, batteries dying, shining dim amber light. Dizzying mosquitoes whined around him as he ran. , stepping into the ditch, water rising up soil from either side, laying it on top of the canvas, careful not to hit hi placed pock-marked black stones on the canvas in the water, closing gaps where water leaked through. They stood together. Did not speak. Bulk of his father beside him, my father looked across the dark land. He heard flood into the alfalfa field. Water tongued, lipped its way along, like an infant exploring the world. Horse breath green scent of alfalfa mixed with carp slime algal aroma of the water. Breeze blew smell of greasewood and dust to him from the south. 36 The western horizon lit with sun bright blaze, a misplaced too early dawn. Shadows of greasewood reached across the field toward them. He looked to his father, wanted assurance the earth had not spun off its axis. He saw black from years beneath the sun. My grandfather looked at his son, into his sleepy green it hit, soon, like an earthquake, or a kick from , diminished, went dark again. Later, a flesh-colored cloud passed with a murmur. Sand and dust, cinder and ash rained down, with a taste of salt and metal. Bees are inextricably linked to this place. Five white beehives sit in the shade of the three trees. Mormons say Deseret means honeybee. They also say that ancient Jews crossed the Atlantic and settled the Americas, bringing honeybees with them. However, the first honeybees in North America were imported to Virginia, by the Dutch, in 1621. Native Americans called the honeybee the 38 because the insects often heralded the coming of white settlers. Aside from making honey, honeybees are effective generalist pollinators and are used throughout the world to pollinate crops. They pollinate alfalfa, but are inefficient. When honeybees take nectar from the flowers they go at it sideways. Often, they do not unhinge the keel and wing petals of the flower, which would release the stamens and stigma within, fertilizing the flower.39 Mostly honeybees honey. 38 Claire Preston, Bee, Animal Series (London: Reaktion, 2006). p 10-11 39 Stephen L. Buchmann, Forgotten Pollinators , ed. Gary Paul Nabhan (Washington, D.C.: Washington, D.C. : Island Press, 1996). P 186 37 Mormons believed honeybees were paragons of puritanical industriousness. Wanting to follow that example, they adopted the honeybee as a sort of talisman for the land they were settling and the relationship they endeavored to have with it, going so far as However, the metaphor of the industrious he bee was technically among the first domesti it has never been, strictly speaking, domesticated. Even though the honeybee is not the creature of metaphor that some suppose, its reality is still a reason to maintain it as a totem, a genius even, of this land and the people who live here. The land is domesticated, providing for the people who live here, but it is fundamentally wild. The honeybee, though, is not the only bee to be found here. Arguably, it is not even the most important. In the first half of the twentieth century, central Utah, with its great number of alkali patches, became the foremost producer of alfalfa seed in the country, producing 300 to 600 pounds of seed per acre. By 1940 research showed that alkali bees were responsible for this. Alkali bees, native to the Great Basin, make their nests in the desolate alkali patches which are too salty for plant growth. Prior to the arrival of European style agriculture, alkali bees depended on indigenous legumes, such as locoweed, for forage. With the arrival of alfalfa, also a legume, alkali bees found an excellent forage, which they efficiently pollinated. In a single day, a female alkali bee can fertilize 2,000 flowers. In her lifetime she may fertilize as many as 25,000. They can fertilize more flowers than a plant can mature into seeds.40 In an inadvertent case of killing the goose who laid the golden egg, farmers in the area plowed more of their land in the 1920s and 30s as the demand for alfalfa seed 40 Buchmann, Forgotten Pollinators . P 186 38 increased. The land that they plowed tended to be the unproductive alkaline soils upon which the alkali bees depended to nest in. As the farmers tilled, flocks of seagulls followed the plows, devouring alkali bee larva. In the 1950s and 60s, dieldrin and parathion were used extensively in the alfalfa fields to control lygus bugs, a major pest to alfalfa. Both of these pesticides are extremely toxic to alkali bees, which are more susceptible to insecticides than honeybees are.41 Because honeybees are inefficient, and alkali bees have suffered reduced numbers, another bee has been brought into the area to fertilize alfalfa flowers; the leafcutter bee. Alfalfa leafcutting bees are native to Europe, and were inadvertently introduced to North America. By the 1940s they had been detected on the continent, and by the 1960s these solitary bees that nest in wood cavities, had increased productivity in alfalfa seed fields dramatically.42 White structures, looking like outhouses on wheels, missing their eastern walls, sit on the edge of the fields. Racks are arranged in the structures, steel poles mounted horizontally, holding thick blocks of pine. The bottoms of the boards show grids of drilled holes, nests for the cutter bees. The wood must be salvaged from some earlier use, because they are stenciled with parts of words, in many faded colors. They are like old advertisements painted on walls, cut up and collaged back together. Female bees find their nests partly through their ability to see color contrast and color patterns. So, all of these conflicting patterns and colors help individual bees locate their nests.43 41 Ibid. p 189-190 42 Theresa L. Pitts-Singer and James H. Cane, "The Alfalfa Leafcutting Bee, Megachile Rotundata: The World's Most Intensively Managed Solitary Bee," Annual Review of Entomology 56(2011). p 222 43 Ibid. p 229 39 The bees emerge from their nests in hot summer weather, mate, and eat nectar and pollen while their first eggs are maturing. Within a week they begin constructing and provisioning the cells for their eggs in wood cavities. Each cell uses about 15 semicircular leaf pieces that the female has cut with her mandibles from the edge of a leaf. She provisions the nest with pollen and nectar, lays her egg and seals the cell. It takes between 81 minutes and 2.5 hours for the bee to complete a cell. She forages for 5-6 hours per day. The female beesat of alkali bees.44 As farming expanded in the area and irrigation increased, excess alkali began accumulating in the already high Ph soils. To move salts beyond the root zone, larger amounts of water were applied to fields. Increased irrigation, in turn, raised the water table and drowned crops. This made farming unprofitable on the family farm, which they began with this new problem, four drainage districts were created in the area in 1914-1918, installing drains through 80,000 acres of cropland.45 The farm is bounded by drainage ditches along its northern end, and most of its western edge. As we reach the northern end of the farm, I make the ninety-degree turn at the edge of the ditch. I was terrified of this point as a child, thinking the truck, and my family within it, would tumble into the deep, wide trench. Time to time, the channel is dredged. Raw earth, pale chunks of silt, clay and marl are dumped on the verge. Now, though, the ditch has become a narrow strip of feral wilderness. Various animals make their home along the frog-skin algae waterway clumped with cattails, between tamarisks and 44 Ibid. p 222-223 45 "Utah State Water Plan Sevier River Basin." P 3-20 40 greasewood growing on the higher walls of the ditch. Ducks dabble there. Coyote and antelope use the place like a fox-hole, out of sight of anyone with a gun. At night, they make forays into the fields, leaving their tracks to be seen in the morning. Stopping the car, we stand on the brink of the drainage ditch. A great blue heron takes flight, leaping out of the stagnant water just below me. Beating its wings slowly, it flies away, remaining below the surface of the fields the entire way. We enter the portion of the farm that has never been plowed. Cattle hooves have made narrow, chalky trails through the greasewood. One trail leads through the thick rabbit brush and greasewood, from one anthill to the next, making the anthills, where harvester ants have stripped the soil bare, gathered the seeds, hauled away stems and built their hills, like beads on a necklace. Russian thistle grows thickly around the ant clearings, making a A clump of burnt tamarisks stands along the side of the road. New green growth, lacey fronds, sprout from the bases of these dead limbs. On top of the tallest dead limb, eight feet up, sits a butcher bird, hunched and surly. He flies away at our approach. There are coyote tracks in dried mud puddles. We are nearing the southwestern gate of the farm, where we will exit this place. with greasewood growing up around it. Its red paint is turning orange-pink beneath the bleaching sun, and flaking off in a few places. The rubber hydraulic hoses are cracking. The last hay my grandfather ever baled still sits in the chute, rotten and brown now. I dreaded his bales when I was younger. Each one weighed between ninety and one hundred-twenty pounds. The baling wire was so tight it was hard to get the hook of a pair of fence pliers under it, let alone my fingers. Moving those bales felt hopeless, just too 41 heavy. My father was never sympatheti d say, a We leave the farm now, but it stays with me. In twenty years, I will still be making pilgrimages to the place, taking away bits of soil and twigs as if they were religious relics. We follow the road away from the farm, to the west and south, toward Black Rock. There are three different Black Rocks in the area: the desert, a ghost town further south, and the mesa. The mesa sits low and dark in the near distance. My grandfather tells me how my uncle and dad used to play on those machines as children, one dangling from the he says. I see an old rusty culvert lying abandoned in a field. First I believe it is the body of an Ayrshire, dead in the desert, but then realize it is just a big rusty pipe, half smashed, covered with the white soil that makes up this land. Then, there is the paintless body of an old truck. It is freckled with bullet holes, half the parts are missing, cannibalized for another machine before abandonment, or carried off to sell as scrap. Still, it seems so solid, and has the desert patina of the volcanic stones, so I first see it as a boulder, flung far from any one of the dormant volcanoes. My grandfather points to a low mound, where the Mud Temple used to stand, but its adobe has melted back into the ground. Near here, my grandfather and great-grandfather dug a ditch in the thick, dry, stoneless alluvium. The top two feet of soil were light and dusty; easy work with a shovel. They almost swept it away instead of digging it, after grubbing out the greasewood roots. 42 Deeper down it was harder, compressed silt and clays, but it broke up easily enough with a pick. The two of them could smell moisture, mixed with the dusty mineral scent of the soil. While digging the ditch, they found the grave of a man. My grandfather thinks he He was buried upside down, standing on his head that was deep in the ground, feet near the surface. He wore a cavalry jacket, whose buttons were covered in verdigris and the wool fabric was rotten. The man wore nothing else. All around his head, like a halo in the hole, were rattlesnake heads. my grandfather saysor he sure made There were other mysteries in the ground as well. While building a fence, digging a post-hole, a clod of soil broke open, making a gasping sound. My grandfather and great- grandfather investigated ing makes it sound like a lungfish, but they have been extinct in North America for millions of years. Maybe it was a tiger salamander hiding in a burrow. I like to believe it is some creature that has remained unknown to science. Maybe the ground is filled with them, waiting to come out of hiding when the climate changes and this desert is covered in water again. We cross another old riverbed. Of all the former channels embroidered across this land, this one is the most defined. This is the course the river followed when the first American explorers passed through the region. The river has long since flowed in a different direction, but this course maintains a sort of half living, ghostly presence. Its channel is still well defined, plainly visible on the ground, far more so than other old channels which can only be seen from the air. Many drainage ditches empty into it, so it often contains water, albeit stagnant and hypereutrophic. 43 o the southwest. It is dry now. Mirages make it look wet. The old rive all the way to the lake, turning it into a marshy, algae-green, salt pond. He nods again, toward the western horizon, like he is greeting someon , as if the mountain is animate, coming and going at will, so that it is worthwhile to note its return. Of course, it has been visible all day. It is always visible unless storm clouds hide it, or winter fog obscures things. We come to the crossroad at the foot of the most northern promontory of Black Rock. It is not really a question. I follow his direction. We follow the gravel road that brings us along the foot of the volcanic slope. The Pahvant Utes used to winter here, between Black Rock and the Sevier River, when Black Rock was almost an island. A band of Goshute also wintered here, migrating from the Deep Creeks to the north bank of the Sevier each winter. The river wrapped around the mesa from its southeast corner, around the north and finally down the west side, following the course that we just crossed. Each spring, the river overflowed, depositing silt, and flooding large areas of valley bottom, creating lush meadows. Willows grew abundantly. Flocks of geese and ducks overwintered here. The river was full of fish. With willows for fuel, the river thick with birds and fishes for the people to eat, and the meadows providing grazing for horses, the area was an ideal winter home. A herd of buffalo also wintered here, migrating every year from the Cherry Creek Mountains in the north, where they summered. As soon as winter camp was established by the Pahvants, most of the men would go to the Canyon Mountains to hunt deer, returning before winter set in fully. About twenty-five years before Mormon settlement, the hunting party departed 44 as usual. Immediately after they departed, snow began to fall. For a month it snowed. Shelters in the village collapsed. Rabbits, coyotes, ducks and geese froze and starved to death. The buffalo did not arrive at the river. The entire herd perished. For five months, the village waited for the men to return. Finally, when the snow had melted enough, the strongest old men went to the mountains to look for their lost hunters. The hunters camp was buried under snow. When the old men found it, and dug down to the shelter, all the men were dead. The last of the hunters had resorted to cannibalism before they too died.46 As the snows melted, the river flooded much more violently than ever before, covering much of the valley in water. The course of the river shifted, so that it flowed just east of where Deseret was later built. This new river channel entrenched deeply into the valley, so that floods did not replenish the meadows to the extent of previous years, and willows did not grow as thickly.47 Jagged boulders, mottled with lichens, are tumbled down the hillside. my grandfather says, pointing to boulders on our left as we drive along the foot of Black R |
| Reference URL | https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6nc98g6 |