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Show Sword of Gen. Patrick E. Connor. USHS collections. In time the freight roads became well traveled, and numerous stations, towns, and ranches sprang up along them. Ultimately, these routes were traveled by thousands of Utahns, some of whom worked in the mines or homesteaded along the way; and many carried attitudes and ideas about life, farming methods, and economic activities back into Utah. Among those who followed the freight roads to fortune w7as William Jennings, w7ho by 1865 had become well-to-do and had far-flung livestock and freight interests as well as Salt Lake City's finest store—the Emporium.12 Far more characteristic was a young Mormon named Frank Wyatt of Wellsville, who worked on the railroad through southern Idaho in the late 1870s, freighted to Montana in the mid-1880s, and then left Wellsville's tight village confines to buy part of James Haslam's homestead between Wellsville and Logan. There he lived on a ranch more typical of the general frontier than early Mormon Utah, yet his w7as a modified village experience.13 42 One gets a feel for Jennings's role in the M o n t a n a trade in Toponce, Reminiscences, pp. 113, 121, 140, 154. For a more general biographical sketch see Tullidge's Quarterly Magazine 1 (1881):359-63. 43 Oral Interview Transcription, Elizabeth Wyatt Winn, July 1973. U t a h State University Local History Project. Oregon Short Line Railroad through Bear River Canyon. USHS collections. |
