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Show PART FIVE Farming & Ranching Roping and tying a calf, 1973- Photograph by Ken Hochfeld, USHS Collections. 169 San Juan: A Hundred Years of Cattle, Sheep, and Dry Farms Charles S. Peterson More than a hundred years ago a construction crew of young Utahns made their way across San Juan County from the southeast. Among them was William T. Tew, my wife's grandfather, who kept a journal of their trip. They entered the county somewhere west of present Dove Creek, worked their way down a rugged drop known as Three Step Hill into Dry Valley, paused at Cane Spring, passed through Moab, ferried the Colorado River, and proceeded on to their homes at Springville and Nephi. Like thousands of other Utahns that year, they had been grading railroad. Unable to find farms as their pioneer fathers had done and with the doors of the educational frontier as yet unopened, they were the "drawers of water and choppers of wood" who opened the plateau country of the Four Corners area, grading and laying much of the track for both the Denver and Rio Grande Western and the Santa Fe railways. This particular crew had been in the railroad camps all winter. Their diet had consisted mainly of cornmeal, and as they worked their way north they tried to relieve the tedium of their limited menu. Some stopped at roadside saloons and others fished for the so-called white salmon of the San Juan River and hunted deer, all with poor success. But their luck seemed to change on Thursday, April 7, 1881, as they ground their way up the slope of the La Sals to Coyote Springs, near which several case-hardened families had made the first 171 San Juan County ranches in the north end of San Juan County. In the cedars a few miles beyond Coyote Spring, as my grandfather told the story, "some of the Nephi boys killed one of the longest-taled Dear I ever saw." While his entry seems to imply disapproval, my grandfather nevertheless took one quarter of this "longtailed buckskin" for the mess with which he traveled and stood by while others dug "a hole and buried" the hide and head. Full of good beef and enjoying rare good weather they pushed on in high spirits the next day "to the cane Springs," passing through "whole mountains of sollid red and stone rock" over the "roughest roads" they had yet encountered. Shortly after they stopped for lunch two grim-eyed men rode up and joined them for dinner. Having eaten some of the evidence, the strangers mounted their horses and one of them announced: some of our outfit had killed one of his Steers and wanted to know who he was. Two men said they did not know any thing about it. He replied that we all knew who they were and if we did not settle for it there he would make it cost us a darned site more. He had us by the heels, so we asked him how much it would cost us. He said that it would cost us SI00.00 to get out One thousand foot long rip-rap dam on the San Juan River at Bluff, 1910. USHS Collections. 172 100 Years of Cattle of it so we let him have a Horse and S30.00 cash . . . $3.65 each. With a little play on words Tew dryly concluded that it was "pretty dear Beef."1 The San Juan country was then, as now, recognizably different. In part its difference was natural - red rock, sand, canyons, and the incredible distances included in its 4.9 million acres, which amounted to nearly 10 percent of Utah's total area. In part the difference was also the product of San Juan's remoteness and its heavy emphasis upon ranching. It was cattle country first, then sheep country, and then both. Still later it was also the promised land to hundreds of dry-farm families. While its ranching tradition is truly the key to the way in which San Juan stands apart from other Utah localities, this difference is much more complex than the mere fact that in old San Juan the ratio of cows to men exceeded any other Utah locality.2 The purpose here, then, is to tell the story of cowboys, cattle barons, sheepherders, and dry farmers in such a way as to point up certain conflicts and adjustments that have given the country character and color. This process might be summarized by saying that Texas ranching converged with Mormon living practices to create a different experience in San Juan's vast expanse. As cultural clashes go, this confrontation was not violent nor bitter, but it has been in process now for more than a century and does much to make this country interesting. Only five years old as a place for white human habitation when the Springville and Nephi railroad builders passed this way, San Juan County was already a ranching county, its character foretold by the timing of settlement and the places from which settlers came. Hidden behind the nation's most imposing geographical barriers, the San Juan country had come to the general attention of Americans only after 1870. Surveyors like John Wesley Powell began to fashion its image as color country. It was a region so unlike other frontiers that its development would require significant adaptations in the modes of settlement and ranching to wrest it from the Indians who had been crowded into it as develop- 173 San Juan County ments elsewhere forced them from earlier homelands. Indeed, until the early 1870s Indian hostilities had stretched a barrier to white penetration along the Wasatch Plateau a hundred miles or more to the northwest. To the east Indians continued to impede white expansion through the Uncom-pahgre and San Juan mountains. That whites were killed at Moab and surveyors harried off the La Sal Mountains in 1875 and that at least four encounters worthy of the name "Indian battle" took place in the next decade gave emphasis to the reality of Indian resistance. Between 1877 and 1885 mounting pressure finally began to breach the barriers, and ranch settlement picked up. This first influx consisted of small ranchers who drifted before the movement of the larger frontier. They came from two directions - some from Utah and some from the Four Corners country and the rest from beyond in ranching country dominated by Texas cattle and practices. From the northwest along the line where the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad was then building came an individualistic smattering out of Utah, some of them Gentiles, some Jack Mormons, and a handful of Mormon stalwarts. Moab, Spanish Valley, Coyote, and old La Sal were destinations for these people. Choosing an altogether different road and thus marking themselves as a different sort came the Hole-in-the-Rockers, in whom die fires of Mormon destiny burned strong. Three major avenues of access also gave recognizable character to different localities. For Castle Valley and Moab the Colorado River and its valley were a high road - making connection with Grand Junction and the mining country beyond. Perhaps a hundred miles to the south was a second major access, the San Juan River, while the great sage plain of the Dove Creek-Mon-ticello country became another natural line of ingress through which had moved the Old Spanish Trail and long-riding Texas cowboys and sheepherders. But in the early 1880s the first small ranchers ran cattle on the north, the west, and south slopes of the La Sals and on the north and east slopes of the Blues. The Hole-in-the- 174 700 Years of Cattle Rockers dug in at Bluff. They built diversion dams and water wheels, shoveled sand from washed-in ditches, worked in Colorado for subsistence, quarreled among themselves, and watched the river carry off their tiny farms. But in the first years they ran only a handful of livestock on the ridges immediately around Bluff rather than getting into the business in any effective way. Between 1882 and 1887 big outfits and bitter competition came to San Juan's cattle ranges. Preston Nutter rode into the country north of the Colorado River. The Pittsburgh Company bought out the small ranchers at La Sal and Coyote. The Carlisles, English noblemen with ranching connections in New Mexico and Kansas and marital connections with Texas, did the same on the north Blues, making headquarters at the Double Cabins or Carlisle and at Piute Springs near the state border. Near Verdure the LC or Lacey Company from the Texas Panhandle also established itself, grazing Montezuma and Recapture creeks and the southeast slopes of the mountain while another Texas outfit, the ELK, dropped below the Mormon outpost at Bluff, running longhorns from the Rincon through Comb Wash onto Elk Ridge. Hard pressed and divided by poverty, the Bluff Mormons shifted their emphasis after 1885 from the farm village practices that had characterized Mormon settlement throughout southern Utah to cooperative livestock management. A cattleman from northeast Utah named Francis A. Hammond was called as stake president. Together with the Lymans, Nielsons, Joneses, Bayleses, Redds, and other famililes of the original settlement, he organized the Bluff Pool. Pursuing tactics that earned them the name of "Bluff Tigers" among non-Mormons, they dickered immediately with Piutes and Navajos for grazing rights on Elk Ridge. Later they invaded "no man's land," a region west of Monument Valley designated by Teddy Roosevelt as a reserve for Indians, and fought back when Indians objected to encroaching stock along Montezuma Creek and on White Mesa. Ranching towns were established at Monticello and Verdure in 1887, and setdement attempts at the 775 San Juan County Rincon on the San Juan River and Mormon Pasture on the Elk Mountains failed. As county assessor, L. H. Redd was tireless in collecting taxes on transient herds, thus reducing the county's appeal to wintering Colorado cattle and generally enhancing the cause of the Mormons who always controlled the country politically. Town dwellers by preference and by church calling, the Bluff stockmen did not regard themselves as cowboys. Like Mormons elsewhere they managed stock cooperatively to support community life rather than as an end in itself. Herders were hired or line riders assigned cooperatively, but few of them lived with their cattle year round or gave themselves to the outfit with the complete loyalty of old-line Texas cowboys, many of whom had no other life whatever. As a type, cowboys were feared and avoided socially and their life-style and values denounced. Indeed, so sharp a social line did the Bluff and Monticello stockmen draw between themselves and the cowboys and cattle barons that a "Mormon cowboy" was for several years something of an oddity. Albert Scorup, for example, who had punched the wildest of cows in the Robbers Roost country and White Canyon, living in caves for months on end and coming into town only occasionally, was greeted at Bluff in 1891 by what historian David Lavender called "a committee of the whole." Thirteen or fourteen "cowboy shy" girls had come to see this loner who continued to style himself "the Mormon cowboy."3 Before many years Scorup had become the hard-riding manager for the Bluff Pool, and a few dozen other young men, including Frank Adams, Monroe and Wayne Redd, and several boys of the Butts family, would certainly have been called "Mormon cowboys." In time even the very stalwarts of the Hole-in-the-Rock group gave themselves to livestock as well as to the church and to their families. Like their stockworking counterparts from the general frontier, they adapted ranching ways that originated in Texas to local conditions and their own values. The product was a set of practices, unique in many ways to San Juan County, that still 776 700 Years of Cattle needs to be examined in detail and compared with cowboy-ing practices elsewhere. Although the Bluff Mormons were often desperate for work, there is no evidence that they punched cows or worked otherwise for the Carlisles or the Lacey outfit. The former had Texas connections through the wife of Harold Carlisle and her son, Latigo Gordon, and are said to have hired long riders from Texas in hopes that the cowboys' well-known loyalty to the outfit would reduce losses to rustling and mavericking. The Lacey outfit had driven cattle directly from the Texas Panhandle to Recapture Wash in 1879 or 1880. Whether they all came from Texas or not is not known, but a long list of relatives including the husbands of Mrs. Lacey's two sisters were involved in the company's management and in successor outfits at Indian Creek, Cross Canyon, and Moab. Prone to violence, the Lacey people hired drifters, died with their boots on, and at least one of them carried a gun regularly long after he became a Moab banker. But the real point is that Mormons from the south end of the county worked for neither outfit. The lone reference suggesting that any Bluff Mormons worked for outsiders is A. J. Scorup's account that he and Frank Adams made a drive for Elk Mountain Texans to Ridgeway, Colorado, in 1890.4 By contrast, a large list of Mormons worked for Cunningham and Carpenter, who bought the Pittsburgh Company in 1895. A few of them, including Hile Savage, appear to have also worked for the Pittsburgh, suggesting a fundamental difference in the lines of social interaction in the south and north ends of the county at extremely early times. Not surprisingly, Mormon standoffishness and the aggressive tactics of the Bluff Pool produced a reaction. At the cowboy level the response was direct and personal. Young and full of life, cowboys undertook to invade the Mormon towns socially. As Fred Keller's Blue Mountain song recounts, they drank at the Blue Goose Saloon, traded with Mons's store, and "danced at night with the Mormon girls."5 Occasionally there was gunplay, much of it in drunken but dangerous fun, 777 San Juan County but now and again with tragic results. Two 1890 shooting sprees involved children. In the first, drunken cowboys shot up the school. Running out of ammunition they broke into Mons Peterson's store and returned to the beleaguered schoolhouse. They stopped only when a thrashing crew rushed to the scene with loaded rifles. On another occasion a group of cowboys had lifted a case of brandy from a stalled freight wagon and coming into town the next morning fired at the feet of two small girls. One cowboy reflected the real feeling behind the episode when he shouted "nits make lice" as he shot at the frightened children. More tragic was the July 2 celebration in 1891 when Tom Roach, a Texan reputed to have killed six men, initiated a shooting spree at a dance where Mrs. Jane Walton and a cowboy who had tried to intervene were killed. More important to the character the community took was the fact that a dozen or so outside cowboys married Mormon girls. Frequently these men stayed in the country. A few, like Harve Williams, became Mormons. Some located in Moab or in neighboring Colorado towns where most of them became the relaxed channels through which Texas and Mormon customs evolved. Over the long haul the cow outfits were overmatched by village settlements and the Mormon Pool. Not favored by homestead legislation, they lost key spots held only by customary use to homesteaders and forfeited water rights when "dummies" or company entrymen defected and sold their filings to Mormons. But on the range the companies managed livestock competitively. Mormon animals were scattered and their cowboys were threatened. Al Scorup, for example, told of returning to his old stamping grounds in White Canyon, [where] five armed Tex-ans surrounded me and said, "See here, youngster, we've scattered your cattle and we mean to use all this feed for our own stuff. You'd better go way back where you came from." I looked around and saw there were several more Texans playing cards . . . I said, "All right, brothers! If that's the way you feel about it, you can have all these dried up canyons and long-horned 775 700 Years of Cattle cattle. I know where there are greener pastures and better cattle! So long!"6 Occasionally, stock belonging to the Pool were killed, usually for camp meat, but according to one report, at least once, stock was killed in wanton and destructive anger. Henry Honaker of Cortez, Colorado, who worked for the Carlisle Company as a "young chap," recalled that the foreman took me to a swale and pointed to a pile of bones bleaching in the sun. "See what happens to Mormon cattle when they come on our range," he said with an oath, "there was 300 head in that bunch."7 Although early settlers thought Honaker's story was exaggerated, some Monticello residents evidently felt that grudges did lead to grazing Carlisle stock on streams used for culinary water with intent to contaminate drinking water with tragic, though unintended, results much later. Writing in 1911, Forest Supervisor Henry Bergh explained: Monticello has withstood many hardships; for a time the health of the community was threatened by the pollution of the water by sheep. The sheep belonging to Carlisle & Gordon, before the creation of the La Sal National Forest, and every year since the creation of the Forest, until this season, have grazed and bedded along the banks of the two Montezuma creeks, which waters had to be used by the residents of Monticello for culinary purposes. It is claimed by the Monticello people that this company had a grudge at them and that they adopted this means of vindicating themselves. At the outset, at least, the residents of this village were unable to protect themselves and they were just compelled to put up with it. During the season of 1910 a great typhoid epidemic broke out in the town and quite a number of fatalities were reported [eleven deaths according to one report]. The results of this being that the town incorporated, elected appropriate officers, and the sanitation of the town and water question was looked into. Plans have, I understand, been perfected for the piping of water from ... the National Forest for ... the town.8 Whether or not the typhoid epidemic of 1910 was the direct result of bad blood between the livestock companies and the Mormons, other developments do seem suggestive. Monticello had lobbied for an 1892 law prohibiting livestock from watersheds within seven miles of towns and worked 179 San Juan County unsuccessfully in 1900 to get teeth put into that law. With the epidemic fresh in mind, the town built its water system in 1912 with the blessing of Mormon Stake President Lemuel H. Redd, who signed the note financing the project. It is also likely that the epidemic had more than a little to do with the fact that the residents of Bluff associated themselves the following year, to purchase "the entire holdings of the Carlisle & Gordon ranch."9 A stated intention was to establish a town to which Bluffs citizens, washed out by floods, could move, as well as new homeseekers attracted by the dry-farming boom that was just then gathering steam. But whatever the later outcome of enmity between contending factions, the late 1880s and early 1890s were the heyday of the big outfits. It was a ranching bonanza that made fortunes for absentee owners, adventuresome English noblemen, and members of Moab's blue-blooded "500 Club" as well as giving some credence to the oft-repeated boast of the previously impoverished Bluff Tigers that Bluff was the wealthiest town per capita west of Kansas City. It was a moist era. Good growth of grass and browse, plus naturally stored surpluses, provided feed for cattle estimated as high as 100,000 head.10 Markets were good. Progress was made in breeding herds up. Great roundups employing as many as 75 to 100 cowboys were held annually, and as many as 25,000 animals are said to have been collected in Dry Valley and other winter ranges. But all this began to change almost before it was established. Hard times struck nationally after 1893. A new era of drought was initiated about the same time which ended only in 1903. Competition and the imbalance of winter and summer ranges led to overgrazing. And for some, what had been adventure became boredom, and longing for the conveniences of civilization replaced enthusiasm for frontier life. Thus, by 1895 bonanza had turned to near panic and the big outfits began to fall apart or get out. Most tried sheep. Some sold to younger members of families and corporations. Some turned local operations over 180 700 Years of Cattle to trusted ranch hands, and a few had sons or sons-in-law who wanted to stay on. New operations of considerable size formed and broke again as times changed. Mormons - both Jack Mormons and the Hole-in-the-Rock variety - seemed generally to be better stayers. In 1895 Cunningham and Carpenter purchased the Pittsburgh Ranch and combined it with widespread ranges at Paradox Valley and on the Book Cliffs and in eastern Colorado. By 1900 the Carlisle Company was prostrate, and its remaining interests turned to sheep under the management of Latigo Gordon, a colorful hard-riding Texas cowboy who had not only accepted sheep but married a local girl and settled down. The Elk Mountain Texans were long gone and the remnants of the Lacey outfit scattered from Cross Canyons in Colorado to Indian Creek and Moab where their interests extended to fruit farming, merchandising, and banking, as well as sheep. Sheep entered the county from the southeast with first Indians and then New Mexico sheepmen bringing them. By 1886 the Bluff Pool had found it necessary to buy one sheep operation to control where its sheep grazed. But elsewhere in southeast Utah sheep came only slowly until the cattle bonanza began to collapse. With a U.S. marshal riding shotgun, the Taylor brothers of Moab breached the sheep deadline from the north in 1895. There was complaint but very little violence, and within three or four years virtually all the big outfits had turned to mixed operations of sheep and cattle. In 1900 some of them, including Cunningham and Carpenter as well as L. H. Redd and other Mormons, clearly contemplated shifting entirely to sheep. Sheep, like cattle, quickly passed their zenith, and well before 1910 the San Juan grazing industry had stabilized to accommodate both sheep and cattle. An important social development was that with the sheep came Mexican herders. Most of these came from northwestern New Mexican villages like Coyote, Abiquiu, and Cuba and maintained close contacts there. Like the Texas cowboys before them, they were skilled stockmen whose lives re- 181 San Juan County volved around their work. Largely without ideas of social conflict and lacking a labor-class mentality, they were loyal to their employers. If they were not utterly without aspiration to change, they at least lacked the strong opportunism that made it difficult for many an Anglo stockworker to keep his mind on the outfit's interests rather than upon his own progress up the ladder of ownership. Initially, only men came from New Mexico. They often returned home for a month or two during the course of the year, but while in Utah they rarely left the herds. In time a few families also came, and at one time a Mexican homestead district was planned and a few homes established at a lonely spot on the south slope of the Elks. Later, little enclaves of Mexicans lived in dilapidated housing in most of the San Juan towns and bigger ranches. As it worked out, this system provided an ideal work force until at least I960. Men of great native ability and sound experience, but with limited opportunity otherwise, devoted their lives to their San Juan County employers. There are observers who think that the devoted intelligence of good stockworkers more than financial wizardry or even the Shaded sheep, 1979. Photograph by G. B. Peterson, © 1983. 182 700 Years of Cattle chance developments of weather and markets has been the making or breaking of the livestock industry. One who holds such an opinion is Chet Smith, longtime cattle foreman at Redd Ranches. He has said again and again that good men at the stockworking level have been the key to Redd Ranches' success as much as Charlie Redd's management. When pressed for examples of such stockmen, it is interesting that Smith came up with a list that included only Mexicans with one exception - Joe Redd, a relative of Charlie who, like the Mexicans, gave himself to the ranch with rare singlemind-edness for many years.11 Right or wrong in his assumptions about whether management or workers played the more important role, Smith was correct about one thing: good stockmen made the difference. Like the Texas-trained cowboys before them, the San Juan Mexicans made real contributions to the county's character that need careful and appreciative examination. But in the decade after the turn of the century, dry farming was the new El Dorado, and the old-time outfits continued to change hands and break up. With hundreds of homesteads and a few giant steam tractors already clearing the sage plains to the east, the Carlisle successors sold out in 1911 to a Bluff consortium to whom the idea of farming districts and villages seemed more compatible. For similar reasons Cunningham and Carpenter watched with jaundiced eyes as homesteaders moved into Paradox Valley, old La Sal, and into the flats and bottoms around their main ranch at La Sal after 1909. Finally in 1914 they too sold out to the same group of Mormons who bought the Carlisle ranch plus a few emigres from the Mormon colonies in Mexico who were looking for homes. It is clear that the Mormon purchasers intended to continue ranching operations, but it is also clear that the old Mormon inclination to expand the bounds of the kingdom through farming settlement was very much alive among them, and homesteading in the locality accelerated immediately as settlers moved in from other Utah regions. In 1915 La Sal townsite was surveyed about two miles west of 183 San Juan County the ranch. A school was built and a Mormon ward of upwards of 400 members established. Termed "an island of hardcore poverty" by one writer, the La Sal dry-farm district was indeed hard pressed.12 Like earlier pioneers, the La Sal homesteaders led a hand-to-mouth existence. They subsisted on what they raised, lived in mud-roofed cabins, and as they hacked out sagebrush and built adobe houses on the townsite they trapped, freighted, and worked for the company (Redd Ranches) or at copper mines and on oil rigs to make an occasional dollar. Once in a while there was a windfall, as when Roy Musselman, an "out East" homesteader, trapped a notorious wolf called "Old Big Foot," which had left a trail of bloody destruction over a range of 700 miles, and collected the $1,000 reward that had been raised by the stockmen.13 But windfalls notwithstanding, the season of good rains passed. The drought tightened and "ditch companies sprang up everywhere." Some were "co-operative affairs, some pure swindlers." At one highly advertised tract in East Paradox which filled solidly with squatters, a wag posted a sign, "Homesteaders, Beware: It's water you want - NOT HOT AIR."14 At La Sal they struggled to develop dry-farm ditches, ran bills at the company store, went deeper in debt, and finally sold out to the La Sal Livestock Company or just walked away from land that had no value, as did the owners of millions of acres throughout the West. A few stayed in the country. A handful got educated and came back to work for Redd Ranches. One or two hung on to diminishing ranches, finding solace for a lonely existence in hatred for the company or by contrast finding friendship and status in their connection with it. Resentments flared in the thirties and forties. Arsonists mistook the company's shift from the previous generation's interest in community building to ranch making to be a naked quest for power and put the torch to threshing machines, barns, shearing sheds, and other buildings.15 In addition, one or two misfits remained. Living like hermits or raising families in conditions as primitive as the first 184 700 Years of Cattle settlers had found seventy-five years before, they gave little thought to bettering themselves. One such was Skeeter Stocks, who had raised nine children in a lonely three-roomed cabin through the roof of which the sky could be seen. Something of his attitude toward development as well as dry humor was apparent in his comment to a visitor that he had been waiting for ten years for a large dead pinyon pine near his cabin to fall so he could drag it in for wood.16 In the neighboring rimrock country of western Colorado historian David Lavender described the "limp fields" of a half-dozen dry farmers held "helpless in the iron grip of poverty." Their children were "ill-educated," raised up in an "incredible mental vacuum," and their bodies "bent and hardened under adult labor." Some reached "maturity without entering a church or sitting down before a white tablecloth. They never flushed a toilet or saw a railroad or stepped on a cement sidewalk." In the face of such conditions some withdrew within themselves, reflecting their rejection of humanity by ill-treatment of friend and foe alike. That some showed the results of withdrawal in physical appearance as well was evident in the demeanor of one stooped, sharp-faced bachelor whose humorless and "tiny rosebud mouth" cowboys said was so "tightly pursed . . . that you couldn't drive a needle into it with a sledge hammer."17 Yet as Lavender tells it, homesteaders were not deficient in pride and determination. To survive a particularly terrible winter one "tore up his mattress and fed the straw" to his milk cow, wrapped his feet in gunny sacks, and butchered his burro, telling his hungry children that it was a deer. When summer came he walked to the county fair where handbills offered $25 for staying in the ring three rounds with a traveling slugger. "He was knocked down seven times, lost three teeth and part of the hearing of one ear. But when he walked home he had twenty-five dollars to give his wife" for a trip to see her ailing father.18 One has the feeling that most La Sal homesteaders were also not deficient in industry and commitment to education. 185 San Juan County Indeed, their commitment to the better things of life was in final analysis the reason the town failed. Their views were larger, and they moved on to fulfill them. Although it began earlier, Blanding was also the product of the dry-farm boom. Apparently established first as a hay ranch by Bluff stockman about the turn of the century, it grew as a community after 1905. The new town was first called Grayson and then changed to Blanding after the family of a philanthropist who purportedly gave the town a library in exchange for the name change. To a degree, Blanding's early fortunes were influenced by the experimental farm established in 1903 a little north and west of Verdure by John A. Widtsoe from the State Agricultural College. Widtsoe, who along with William Smythe and President Theodore Roosevelt, was one of America's great advocates of the idea that the nation's real vitality came from country living, developed the science of dry farming. Throughout Utah he experimented with its possibilities, demonstrated its methods, preached its virtues, and founded arid farm companies and communities. Proteges of Widtsoe in San Juan County were his students Dan Perkins and Will Brooks, who "loved this man and looked upon him as our guiding star."19 With his encouragement they ran the experiment farm and with money borrowed from Hans Bayles made a down payment on 3,000 acres of state land, taking out enlarged homesteads of 360 acres each for themselves. During 1909 they cleared land, built fences, and broadened their partnership to include Dan's brother Soapy, who had a few hundred head of cattle. The press of debt, however, became a major problem. The first winter Brooks taught school at Liberty, New Mexico, in part because they needed money desperately and in part because church leaders called him to. Later, both partners worked in local cooperatives, at trading posts, flour mills, and elsewhere. Newly wed, Perkins's wife was a casualty of the typhoid epidemic in the fall of 1910. Brooks himself laid at death's door for ten days; through a thin board wall he heard 786 700 Years of Cattle her die and nearly gave up the ghost himself. The shock barely slowed them. Indeed, 1911 was a year of great promise. Brooks went into partnership on a store, hired a clerk, and camped out "working on his land project." As he later recalled: I can hardly explain how good everything looked to me in San Juan this summer of 1911. I took stock in a new flour mill that was being set up to handle some of our wheat: I helped to manage the State Experiment Farm; my homestead included some wonderful land and water, and our big collective farm seemed to have boundless possibilities. Perhaps they were only a young man's dreams, but I thought I could see a good comfortable life ahead for me, and a chance to become wealthy.20 But Brooks had taken a wife who proved unequal to the new frontier, and by mid-1912 he pulled out. With the boom well underway he salvaged $8,000 from his interests. Earl Halls's experience in the "out East" dry-farming district was more typical. Circumstances, rather than the vision of a great social planner like Widtsoe, brought him to the country. He was born in Mancos, Colorado, but had returned to his ancestral home at Huntsville, Utah, where he had ranched, learned blacksmithing at the Agricultural College, and ramrodded an Idaho hay ranch for an uncle. In 1915 another relative went into partnership with Frank Adams at Monticello in a garage and began encouraging Earl to join him. Friction between Halls and his uncle led him to make a trip back to San Juan late in the summer of that year. Once there he worked at Barton's sawmill at Verdure during the fall and sawed cord wood for Monticello people with a "one lunged," water-cooled gas engine during the winter. As he put it: Sure was slim pickings that winter. We had to take flour, spuds, or whatever we could get, for pay. There was no money in the country. Someone, generally a cow-man, would write out a check, possibly for $5, and the check would pass around, for change, until it was worn out. Then someone would take it back to him and he would make out a fresh one. That was the way they had to make change. There was no change, very little money.21 It was a hard winter. Monticello's famous wind worked 187 San Juan County overtime, and snow drifted to six-foot depths in the streets. Halls recalled attending a silent movie in a "barnlike place made of lumber, and covered with tin. The snow would drift in, and the wind howled." Walking home they crossed Main Street in which lay a five-foot drift. His wife "crawled across on her dress, and I wallowed through . . . . After we were through, a little fellow about five feet tall (full-grown man) started across, but sank in all over, and he started to shout, 'Somebody come and help me.'"22 But even this story pales by comparison to Will Brooks's account of a monumental storm the spring of 1909 that never slacked until it had covered all the fences. We made paths and tunnels to the barns, and sat out a full six weeks of repeated storms. We just settled down in the homes, but had parties almost every night. During that time I met all the people of Monticello, the best class of people that I ever associated with in all my life.23 As bleak as things looked, Halls struggled out to Lock-erby in February 1916 where he homesteaded 320 acres, bought a team and wagon in New Mexico, and pitched a tent on his property. The first summer he cleared twenty acres and hauled lumber from a mill to Monticello to pay for some wood from which he built a one-room shack and a floor on which he pitched his tent. Within three years he had cleared a total of 65 acres, proved up on the place, and, just as prices began to fall and the drought to close in, mortgaged his land to the Federal Land Bank for $1,800. With this he bought a small tractor and leased an adjoining farm of 110 acres. One year a neighbor's child set fire to his stackyards by accident, and he only survived by gifts from neighbors. Another year the Monticello banker from whom he was leasing talked him out of hiring a thrashing machine to thrash grain that could have been sold at the machine for $2.50 a hundred so they could use the bank's own outfit. By the time the bank's machine got to his place it was December 7, a foot of snow was on the ground, and it had been raining. He recalled: I lost 600 bushels of wheat that was too wet to thresh, and there was no market for wheat. The land owners brought a herd of 188 700 Years of Cattle hogs out from Monticello to feed around the straw stacks so they didn't lose. Next spring the bank had my wheat hauled out to the railroad and gave me credit for 50 cents a hundred for it on my note. I had to borrow money to farm with.24 Halls also had his trouble with cattlemen. One named McCabe was determined to run the squatters out. But let Halls tell the story. They would cut our fences and turn a big bunch of cattle in to our crops. One or two hundred cattle can clean out a homesteader in one night. But we hung together. One neighbor shot two bulls worth two or three hundred dollars each. One day the cattlemen drove a herd in on his land, and he drove the bunch out, down the canyon. I should say, here, that we farmed on the top of a plateau. We were on top; and canyons below us. These cattlemen would bring a bunch of cattle up a draw with ledges on either side, cut the fence, let them in, and ride on. On this particular day, as we dogged the cattle out, we met McCabe down below and asked him which way he wanted his cattle to go, up the canyon or down. In answer he got off his horse and pulled his rifle out of the scabbard and I rode back out of sight and set the dog on the cattle. They went down the canyon and into his other bunch. Another time a neighbor sent word that cattle were in my corn. I had ten acres. I got on my horse and rode over. The field was across the canyon from our house and rest of the land. There were some 30 or 40 cattle in. I drove them out, but one little long-horned cow refused to go. I could hear her running between me and the canyon rim, I jumped off the horse and waited until she came in sight. I shot and got her in the backbone and down she went. Another shot in the ear finished her, and I pulled her one end at a time, until I was able to push her over the ledge, down 40 feet. I guess she is still there. Another farmer about five miles west of us put a 30-30 bullet in a post by the elbow of a cowman who had just cut die top wire of his fence. He had his sons holding a bunch of cattle in the trees ready to put them in a farmer's field. The cowmen soon found out the homesteaders weren't to be fooled with, and became friendly. A year or so later a neighbor and I ate dinner with McCabe at his cow camp, and were treated royally. I also cleared some land for him in exchange for a horse.25 Apparent in Halls's memoir are antipathy for bankers who let him carry the rap and some showing of violence between stockmen and squatters. But occasional conflict also 189 San Juan County broke out between homesteaders themselves. Sometimes they fought over where schools should be located. On one occasion some of them even stole a school, pulling the one-room structure from one site to another. Other times conflict over water, land, or right-of-way was at the core of discord. Two men named Bradford had harassed one named Stevens for months over a road he had to use to get to some of his property. Finally, Stevens took to carrying a gun, and on one occasion told Halls that the next time he and the Bradfords met "one of them would eat breakfast in hell the next morning." Another time when Halls stayed in Stevens's cabin one night while the owner was temporarily away, he awoke "with the flicker of a match in my face, and a 38 revolver pointed at my head, and Stevens said 'It's you, is it?' Well, I stayed there . . . [but] will say here that the hole in the end of a 38 revolver looks pretty big, even by the light of a match."26 Later, Stevens bushwhacked the Bradfords as they returned from Monticello in a two-horse buggy. Stevens started to shoot, first striking Charlie, and the team ran. He shot through the back of the seat, hitting Charlie again. George got out, but was hit, and hid back of a log. The team ran home with Charlie still in the buggy. Stevens walked up to the log and finished George. Stevens headed for the canyons and a posse tried to locate him, but didn't want to, I think. After two weeks he came to the county attorney's home one night, about three in the morning, and gave himself up. He was put in jail and in a week or so was let out on bail. He is still out on bail. Apparently no one ever tried to find him. Everyone in the county that knew the Bradfords knew that they had it coming.27 By 1922 the "country had gone to pot." Gas was 60 cents per gallon and jackrabbits swarmed the dry farms. There were "for sale" signs "on every farm" but no buyers. Neither Halls nor his neighbors could pay the interest on their loans much less pay anything on the principal. Many people just left and let the banks sue them. Halls signed his deeds over to the Federal Land Bank, tried to sell what he could, and planned to store his tractor, for which there was no sale at any price. 7.90 700 Years of Cattle But San Juan's dry-farm bonanza was not yet through with him. On the way out of Monticello he was stopped by the county attorney who asked if he "wanted to manage a large ranch." The next morning he looked it over with a man by the name of LeFete who had just bought 1,100 acres of farm land, and seven or eight sections of range land. We went to the ranch, seven miles north of Monticello. LeFete told me he wanted to build barns, hog pens, graineries, reservoirs and so forth, and wanted me to be foreman. I would be paid $125 a month with a house to live in, and garden and meat furnished. Well manna had started to fall from heaven, and I took the job. The rest of that fall I had as many as 35 to 40 men to herd. Mostly I rode a horse between jobs. We bought 16' head of horses, 75 head of pureblood cows and other range cattle, and 35 head of pure-blood pigs. The drouth came - blew grain out of the ground, roots and all, with large piles of dirt at the ends of the fields like snowdrifts. Jack rabbits were so thick they could clean a hundred acre field overnight. There was no water to irrigate with. We hauled 200 pigs to Dolores, Colorado. They weighed 90 to 110 pounds each. We got 82.30 each for them. They were used to make hog cholera serum. We hauled them 78 miles in wagons. It was either that or let diem starve to death. Grain was too high to feed pigs at that time.28 In September 1924 "the ranch boss came from Kansas City," closed down the operation, and leased the ranch to Jude Bailey. After nine years Halls headed back to Huntsville. He had not done as well as Brooks but doubtless had fared as well as many. Established families with livestock interests and support from commercial enterprises, mining, and other activities survived. Extended drought and depression closed many others down. The county's population had soared from slightly more than 1,000 in the years before the boom to 3,379 in 1920; the number of farms rose from 157 in 1910 to 405 in 1920. By 1925 farm numbers had fallen again to 263.29 With the break-up of the big outfits and the initiation of the dry-farm era after 1910, change and development continued to characterize San Juan County's livestock industry. Although the number of people who ran stock increased 191 San Juan County rag y <> « u a. V $ ttle 5 1/5 i-l s (/5 i-l a 0 -a 1/5 hi I Q 6C 1 I 0 1 1/5 -1 1/5 I 1/3 1/5 -J <3 OS N o SO X (T5 SO GO £ SO © OS £ <s» 90 ITS rO OS 583 100 IT 1,031 o HI © IH ITN OS rH 1,235 OS SO r- IT\ rH i O © SO, i-T O l/S O rH O r- SO r~- rH X o rfi r- OS © SO (SI GC so m m OS 3 3 OS i-T OS OS © m rH SO ^* SO r- OS IH O £ i/s rH s OS r-m t/\ so ~* X rH -* l/S «•> rH N rn in n SO in X, l/S ( S | lf> rH OS OS © M ao M h- X OS fKfl r- X OS i-T N © VO m m N o N OS X rft ff> © W) (S X SO >(S* OS OS IT\ o N m er> Os so' rH -* M OS (M rH ^* Os ff> o r- OS o *** l/S -O*S i/s <H o rr> -** rft rH OS M OS 192 700 Years of Cattle sharply, it was still characterized by relatively large herds owned by a relatively small number of people. Elsewhere, Utah was absolutely unique in the large numbej of farm-based operators that ran a few dozen head of sheep or cattle. A rough idea for the comparative position of San Juan to other counties may be gained by comparing La Sal National Forest grazing permits to Manti National Forest grazing permits.30 With the early outfits gone and an increasing number of stockmen using the range (up to 160 cattlemen and 25 or 30 sheepmen), the big roundup of earlier days gave way to what locals have referred to as "greasy sack" operations. Cattle were scattered over vast areas - 3,000 square miles according to one writer. Cowboys rode widely in all kinds of weather and knew every draw and ridge in the great triangle formed by the Colorado, San Juan, and Dolores rivers. In the "long season of death which in happier climes is known as spring," herds trailed off State Line Hill or crossed the Colorado River in boiling runoffs to maintain schedules set by hard-nosed bosses who never signed contracts but whose word was their bond. Cowboys slept in the mud, ate their own greasy compounds, and drank what one called "venomous coffee." They lived alone in caves or shared line shacks so small "a cocked elbow" made them dangerous, read pulps on the wild West, and felt chesty to see "their drab trade glorified."31 At first look they were a nondescript, varied lot. Among them were tenderfeet from the East like John Riis, whom John Cunningham palmed off on the Forest Service in time to head off a mutiny among his other riders. Some were boys full of romance but at home on their granddad's outfit, like Bill Alfred, or who looked at cowboying as God-sent relief from the tedium of life on the dry farm, as did Milton Jameson. Others, like Alfred's cousin Ardin Johnson, rode horses or worked cows only under duress, turning by preference to machinery or visiting among the ranching and dry-farm neighbors. Still others were relics of the past. Cy Orr, who carried no more meat "than a yucca blade" holed up winters near 193 San Juan County Paradox in a filthy shack known locally as the "Boar's Den" but summers still trailed cows beween Scorup's Indian Creek country and Al Lavender's Lone Cone Summer Camp. His face was terribly eaten by cancer, and his thin frame shivered at the slightest hint of cool. To combat the chills he drank himself senseless on home brew he made from potatoes. Yet he had pride in his work and a certain dignity, perhaps held over from remembered days when he came to western Colorado-from England by way of Texas.32 Another partial cripple was Lee Larson, who, as Bill Alfred tells, needed no babying because of his missing leg Using one crutch, he jumped around, saddled his horse and hopped up from the right side into his saddle. A strap from the cantle to the left saddle forks cinched around his waist gave him balance and he stuck like a burr on his horses. Some of them were frisky and bucked a little. Lee had guts, pride, and plenty of cow savvy and didn't want anyone doing his work for him.33 Donnie Marsden, whose "long, limp face and long, limp mustache" were always partially hidden under a "high steepled" Mexican hat, had been scalped by a lariat, but notwithstanding the idiosyncrasies of his appearance, was a good cowboy.34 Latigo Gordon and several others had lost fingers and one Moab boy an arm working the dallies of rawhide ropes. Some, like John Scott, were superb cowboys but subject to moods beyond their control. "Grotesquely homely," he plastered his "thin black hair . . . to his bony skull" and had "a red, bulbous, pockmarked nose and green eyes set so close together it was said you could not put a cigarette paper edgewise between them . . . He camped at sheep outfits and cursed his fellow cattlemen to the Mexican herders; he joined the Mormon Church when riding in Utah," and on going "to Colorado could not think of enough evil to say of his religion."35 Dave Lavender, who spent some of his best and some of his worst hours with Scott, recalled: He could track wild animals like an Indian and could tell more lore in a more fascinating way than any man I ever knew. But he was always looking out for John Scott. When I was a youngster he lazily used to take but one bed along on the rides, saying we 194 700 Years of Cattle could sleep together and save the bothers of extra packing. Many a night I did not sleep, however. He snored like a lumber mill. He shoved me with his knees and rammed me with his elbows until he rolled me out on the cold, stony ground. In desperation I would steal a blanket, wrap up in it, and crouch by the fire, hating him until my arms trembled and my mouth turned dry and hot. In the morning he was enormously surprised and blamed his antics on nightmares. I never believed him. I think he wanted the bed to himself and manufactured his dreams to get it. A first-rate cowboy, Scott nevertheless reached his greatest heights as a storyteller. With an "ear for dialect" and a "mimicry of mannerisms" that was both "shrewd" and "mercilessly exact," he held his listeners. "His hard, knobby body leaned forward. His green eyes snapped, and his crabbed red face grew full of magic. The ugliness disappeared," and he swept listeners "irresistably into a fairyland of word and sonorous tone, of soft gesture and biting allusion."3 Of a similar cut was Amasy Larsen of Moab, who for years rode the San Juan and Grand county ranges. According to Faun McConkie Tanner, he was born in 1866, drank heavily, and when sober talked plainly, but when drinking had a pronounced lisp. "He was lanky, hardly wide enough to hide a bottle, long in the back, and his shirttail was always flying in the breeze." Because of a badly set broken leg he walked on the side of his feet. Arrested once in Grand Junction he was taken before a judge for drunkenness. When he pled not guilty, the judge asked why it was he had been "wobbling down the street." At this Amasy pulled off a boot, "shook it in the judges face, and lisped, 'Judge, if you can walk thtraight in that boot, I'll plead guilty.'" The charges were dropped. As a boy he spent only two days in school and could neither read nor write. A Grand Junction newsboy who tried to hawk a paper to him was turned down because "I'd be wasting my nickel, I can't read." Quick in his reply, the boy retorted, 'You could smell it - its all bull anyway." Quick to appreciate the point, Amasy bought the boy's entire stock. Faun McConkie Tanner tells two other stories that convey not only the man's personality but the humor that char- 795 San Juan County Round up and branding time in San Juan County, 1973- Photographs by Ken Hochfeld, USHS Collections. 196 700 Years of Cattle 197 San Juan County acterized the cowboy fraternity: One day he dropped into his favorite barber shop. The barber slapped a hot towel on his face. Amasa reared up in the chair and bellowed, "Jethuth Chritht, Krug! When thith dod-damned towel getth cool enough tho you can thtand to take hold of it, would you pleathe take the dod-damned thing off my faith!" So far as he was concerned, there were only two ways to travel - both of them on horseback. Once a year he deviated from this theory when he drove his steers to Thompson and rode the cattle train with them to the eastern market. He was perhaps more awed than the rest of the townspeople when the first bi-wing airplane flew over the valley. He moved into the street with the rest of the residents and squinted at the mechanized bird until it disappeared in the horizon. "Amasa, how'd you like to be up there with that pilot?" someone asked. The old cowboy seemed to reflect a moment, then replied soberly, "Id'd a dang thight rather be up there with him than without him!"37 Names too were colorful. Fred Keller points this up in his Blue Mountain ballad. 'Yarn Gallus with gun and rope" refers to Henry Goodman, a Texas rider who was variously said to hold his pants up with a single string of yarn or to dutifully wear yarn suspenders knit by his mother and sent him from Missouri. "Doc Few Clothes" was Tom Trout, one-time Carlisle rider whose tall body left an ample length of bare back and a bit of cleavage showing between his shirt tail and his low-riding Levi pants.38 More seriously, there were dozens of riders still in the country who were of good humor and quick wit but better remembered because they worked cattle well or got on with other men. Some showed an almost unbelievable commitment to the work of handling cattle. Among these was A. J. Scorup who by constant riding built a spread that is said to have operated on more than a million and a third acres of canyon-wracked public domain. Another was his foreman Harve Williams who, with obvious reference to the Biblical Jacob's fourteen years of cattle management to win a bride, used to say that he had worked for forty years before Scorup had given him one of his daughters. Yet another was grey-eyed bachelor Chet Smith, cattle foreman for Redd Ranches, 198 700 Years of Cattle for whom, as I have good reason to remember, dairy cows and the choreboys who milked them were a special anathema.39 Cattle were hated, coddled, abused, handled with deft skill, but one suspects almost never loved. The huge five- or six-year-old steers were gone except for a few "snakes" that still haunted remote cedar points. In their place, cowboys of the era after 1910 worked yearling steers with most of the longhorn bred out of them and with Hereford rapidly replacing the Durham and Shorthorn of the early Utah strains. In 1918 Albert and James Scorup, two brothers with fantastic dedication to desert cowboying and more than a modest spirit for adventure, joined William and Andrew Somer-ville of Moab to buy the Indian Creek Cattle Company from David Goudelock and other Moab stockmen in a deal that sent reverberations through every part of the country and involved at least eight transactions in which cash and property totalling over $850,000 changed hands. A hard winter in 1919-20 in which the Scorup-Somerville outfit lost 1,500 head of cattle drove the Adams brothers, who had taken over other Scorup ranches, to the wall. Reabsorbing these operations and staving off disaster as prices fell and drought took the country in the 1920s, the Scorups headed what was known as the Indian Creek Cattle Pool for a number of years before incorporating as Scorup-Somerville in 1926. By 1937, when they acquired private ground on the La Sal Mountains from Goudelock and others, Scorup-Somerville ran on more than 36,000 privately owned acres and upwards of 1.3 million acres of public domain and national forest. The outfit's forest permit (sometimes reported to be as many as 7,000 or 8,000 head) is said to have been the largest single permit in the United States.40 Meantime, the La Sal Livestock Company extended its operations. The company barely survived the hard times of the early 1920s, and its manager, Charlie Redd, diversified his interests to build buffers for his stock business, bought out an increasing number of the earlier stockholders, and picked 199 San Juan County up small bits of property as broken homesteaders left the country around La Sal. By the mid-1950s the home ranch, which in the Cunningham-Carpenter era had included about 900 acres of farm land, had been enlarged to nearly 2,000 acres of farming and improved pasture ground. More important, the ranch found opportunity to buy out Colorado ranchers with whom it had long dealt and by the later 1930s had, according to one source, 47,000 acres of deeded land and large forest permits, as well as vast acreages of Grazing Service or Bureau of Land Management permits.41 Other San Juan operators had also moved increasingly into western Colorado. The interaction between the two areas had always been strong. But for years the movement appeared to be primarily from east to west. First came Colorado cattlemen, later sheep, then cattle buyers and dry farmers. But San Juan-based Utahns had always depended upon Colorado. First they worked there in the mines and grading railroad tracks. Then they looked to banks at Durango and Grand Junction, which often provided handier credit than Salt Lake institutions. Winter range was in better supply in Utah, summer in Colorado. To keep Colorado stockmen from invading their winter range, Utahns had only one alternative - fill winter ranges and expand into Colorado for summer grazing. As a consequence, Utah stock had always been summered in Colorado either under the care of their Utah owners or by new Colorado owners to whom they had been sold. In addition, markets for Utah cows as well as sheep and wool lay to the east, beyond Colorado, at Kansas City, Omaha, or Chicago. Stock driven to Colorado was on the way to market; consequently, animals and the ranging customs of Utah were drawn eastward by the workings of market systems. Two important points remain. First, the long-range calculus of social and natural forces had worked to bring the country under control of stockmen of Mormon background. The metropolis from which they drew was closer at hand, and they tended to be of bigger families, allowing one to replace another if he pulled out of the country. For several dec- 200 700 Years of Cattle ades the sense that San Juan was Mormon country, part of the kingdom to be settled and held, also made them better stayers. They lived in San Juan with less of a sense that they needed to return to Denver, St. Louis, or Los Angeles. If they did go to the city, it tended to be Salt Lake City or to Provo, as it was in the case of both A. J. Scorup and Charlie Redd. But in the final analysis, the Mormon sense of religious destiny that had guided the first generation of San Juan County's community builders did not extend to the second generation. Indeed, it would seem that both Charlie Redd and A. J. Scorup built ranches in the traditional sense. They were in effect more ranchers than Mormor settlers. For them the effective agenda was a money-making outfit, not a country held by the Mormons and congenial to their ways. With the passing of time the old "near nationalism" that guided Mormons in the early days had become a dead letter. True, Mormons believed the millennium was still coming, but their agenda called less for the expansion of its physical or geographic base and more for personal righteousness and conversion of new members to the church.42 How the current crop of small ranchers and farmers fit into this context is not known. Recent decades are too close to us - the data is not in. But it is safe to say that San Juan long remained a frontier remote and sparsely settled. It lay between the Texas-influenced livestock frontier of the broader West and the Mormon Great Basin. Profoundly influenced by each of these cultures, San Juan was nevertheless isolated enough over a relatively long period of time to develop a character of its own - one that, for this writer at least, is among the most interesting to be found in the American West. NOTES 'journal of William T. Tew, entries for spring 1881, copy in author's possession. 2Don D. Walker, "The Cattle Industry of Utah, 1850-1900: An Historical Profile," and "The Carlisles: Cattle Barons of the Upper Basin," Utah Historical Quarterly 32 (Summer 1964): 190, 268-84. 207 San Juan County ^David Lavender, One Man's West (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1943), p. 192; and Stena Scorup,/ A. Scorup: A Utah Cattleman (n.p., n.d), pp. 26-27, 30. 'Scorup,/ A. Scorup, p. 25. Tred W. Keller, "Blue Mountain," copy in author's possession. ''Scorup,./. A. Scorup, pp. 26-27. Cornelia Adams Perkins, Marian Gardner Nielson, and Lenora Butt Jones, Saga of San Juan (San Juan County: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1968), p. 106. BHenry A. Bergh, Cliffdwellcrs Echo 1 (January 1912), Records of the La Sal National Forest, pp. 58-60, National Archives; and James Monroe Redd Oral History, July 21, 1973, p 3, Charles Redd Oral History Project, Brigham Young University. ''Henry A. Bergh, Cliffdwellers Echo 1 (January 1912): 58. '"Francis A. Hammond was responsible for this estimate, which according to tax records and census information was much too high. See his Journal, December 17, 1885. Others have repeated the figure; see James Monroe Redd Oral History, August 20, 1973, p. 2, for example. "Chester B. Smith Oral History, October 19-21, 1973, pp. 21-22, Charles Redd Oral History Project 12B. W. Allred, "Cattle Roundup, Mountain Style," Corral Dust: The Brarrdbook of the Potomoc Corral of Westerners (1966) (p. 17 in MS in author's possession). ^Times-Independent (Moab), April 1, 1920, and Charles S. Peterson, Look to the Mountains: Southeastern Utah and the La Sal National Forest (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1975 ), p. 204. '^Lavender, One Man's West, pp. 142-43 l5Fires at Redd Ranches in the 1930s and 1940s are described in numerous oral histories from the Charles Redd Oral History Project. 16Austin E. Fife, Moab, Utah, August 6, 1955, Fife Mormon Collection, Series I 923, p. 4. 'Lavender, One Man's West, p. 151. '"Ibid., p. 209. |,JJuanita Brooks, Uncle Will Tells His Own Story (Salt Lake City: Taggart & Company, 1970), p. 134. 2"lbid., p. 137. 2'Earl Halls, "Incidents in the Life of Earl Halls" (May 16, 1968), p. 9, copy in author's possession. 22Ibid. "Brooks, Uncle Will Tells His Own Story, p. 116. 2 'Halls, "Incidents in the Life of Earl Halls," p. 13. "Ibid., p. 10. 26Ibid., p. 10-11. 2"lbid. 2HIbid., p. 14. 295an Juan County: Basic Data of Economic Activities and Resources, compiled by the Utah State Planning Board (Salt Lake City, 1940). s"Peterson, Look to the Mountains, p. 174. 5'Allred, "Cattle Roundup, Mountain Style," and Lavender, One Man's West, pp. 101 and 117. "Lavender, One Mans West, pp. 119-21. "Allred, "Cattle Roundup, Mountain Style." •v,Lavendcr, One Man's West, p. 126. "ibid., pp. 150-54. ,6Ibid, pp. 153-56. ^Faun McConkie Tanner, The Far Country: A Regional History of Moab and La Sal. Utah (Salt Lake City: Olympus Publishing Company, 1976), pp. 319-21. 202 700 Years of Cattle ™Ibid„ pp. 316-17, B. W. Allred Oral History, June 2. 1973, pp. 42, 60, Charles Redd Oral History Project, also provides good descriptions of Goodman and Trout. "Charles Peterson leased Redd Ranches' dairy herd from 1953 to 1956 but to his chagrin was always referred to locally by the traditional ranching term "the choreboy." 4"Scorup, / A. Scorup: A Utah Cattleman, especially pp. 38-46; Harve Williams Oral History, June 13, July 6, August 7 and 10, 1973, Charles Redd Oral History Project, also contains much information. ^'For general information on Redd Ranches see Kathy Redd, "History of La Sal, Utah," in Perkins et. al., Saga of San Juan pp. 170-93; also see various oral histories from the Charles Redd Oral History Project. 42Klaus J. Hansen. Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God and the Council of Fifty on Mormon History (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1970) deals with Mormon assumptions about the millennium. Charles Peterson, Utah: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton and Company, 1977), pp. 78-105, treats nationlike inclinations of early Utah Mormons. 203 |
