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Show View from the Red Point Thus began a guerrilla war, of a white mans temper and a red mans pride. It brought both peace and a good Sunday dinner to a close. send Suspecting trouble, the settlers decided on Monday to some boys out to round up the cattle, which were then grazing them peacefully in a valley nine miles to the south. A dozen ofsouth. the to off and rode of fort the south at the gate gathered Pete Munk and Pete Ludvigson had guns. Nobody else had anything more deadly than mean tempers, and all they expected to do was scatter, round up the critters, and head them all back to the fort. before they But they ran into a Ute ambush at Nine-Mil- e before them they had to the and scattered attack the cattle, got arrows of the burst at was first killed Pete intended. Ludvigson and some gunfire, and the others laid low over their saddles and scattered wide, circling wide to get back to Manti individually. A heavily armed party from the fort reached Pete a few hours later. They found him unscalped, but stripped of every stitch of clothing but his socks. A strip of flesh had been cut from his back. Presumably in some kind of warrior rites, the flesh. The Sanpete Utes had eaten parts of the stripped-of- f armed party from the fort picked up their gruesome bundle, covered it and lashed it to a horse, and returned the remains to Manti. There was more than one such incident. Making another swoop on another day, the Utes drove the animals south in stampede. Before the young men who were guarding that bunch could organize any kind of effective response the whooping Utes and the cattle were nearly out of sight. Possibly embarrased and determined to regain their lost faces, as well as the cattle, two of the herdsmen took it on themselves to get the settlements critters back alone, and they took after the raiders in hot pursuit. They returned a few hours later, their bodies lashed to their saddles and filled with arrows, their horses walking slowly home to the fort on their own. Their hearts, still dripping blood, were tied to their saddle horns. When the Black Hawk war had simmered down, it was some of the Old Ones from the original Manti settlement, but specifically from Ephraim, who crossed the 10,000-foWasatch Plateau in 1877 to settle Castle Dale and Huntington. A few of these were also involved in the settlement of the red rock country of Moab. Daniel W. Jones has written that some individual harangues with Indians arose because the Indians would not recognize the validity of fences and pastured their ponies in the settlers farm fields, to the detriment, of course, of crops. When the irate settlers asked them why they did that, the Indians had a counter-questio- n that was hard to beat by logic alone: Whose lands have you fenced? The reply was not forensic, but effective anyway. Indian ponies were run out and kept out at gunpoint. In the excitement nobody thought to ask the Indians whose ponies they were riding. Obviously, most of Sanpetes people were not ready yet to harness their horses and forge their guns into plowshares. lasted for The habit of keeping cattle within the gates a long time at Manti, especially with milk cows. Until the period following the Second World War there were almost as many dairy cattle within the town limits as outside. Brother Brighams counsel to live in forts was well heeded until about 1850, although the need for walls was not obvious after the 1870s. By the 1870s a good many of the old rock houses one can still find in the Manti of these days had begun to fill in the square town blocks, both inside and outside the area of the big fort, until by 1880 not even Walker and Sanpete knew the place anymore. There were not enough rock masons to go around, so somebody started to make bricks out of mud in the 1850s and 60s, drying them in the sun like raisins, in a manner believed first to have been described by Samuel Brannan, in California. As their converts were gathered, so also did the Mormons gather their skills and their materials from many places. Even men of faith have to have a sense of earthly logic. By the 70s there was still no clear feeling of meaning anything. For Manti, being founded and growing had been a little sound and a rash of fury, signifying not very much to the mortal, naked eye. They recalled only vaguely that Heber C. Kimball had told them that a Temple would be (Editors Note: View from the Red Point, a popularized account of the beginnings of Utah, by Albert published serially in the Manti AnrtVS.belne and Ephraim Enterprise. A significant historical Messenger document, Ve" rom Red Point is fascinating Readers wlU llkely wan.t to cliP each installment reading. and combine them at the completion of publication into a complete narrative.) South-Centr- . al There was little extra food left to be shared at the Fort, and there wasnt much room for more people inside either. Most of the Danes camped just outside the walls and ate their frozen potatoes and bread from smutty wheat all winter, content to have bad food instead of none. They came to Manti in the tracks of a half dozen families from the settlement on Pleasant Creek, five miles north of Allreds. Hambleton and Gardner Potter had established a sawmill there in 1851, and six families had followed them in 1852, built some houses, fenced some farmland, planted grain, and reaped a modest harvest. In 1853 they were frightened out by Brother Walkers little War. Isaac Behunin tried to farm some land on Pine Creek, just seven miles north of Manti, but he got the feel too. A dogged sort of persistence then set in with Brighams folks in Sanpete. In 1854 a group formerly from Allreds with some of the Danes to establish Fort joined forces Ephraim on the site of Behunins farm. This time they built a fort first, unlike the people at Pleasant Creek and Allreds, much to Brother Brighams relief. He had been urging them to do that for some time, but occasionally his voice got a little mixed with the north wind at a distance of a hundred and twenty-fiv- e The miles. Said Brother Brigham caustically: people are readier to obey Brother Walkers invitation to live together in towns than they are to heed by counsel. The Ephraim fort surrounded an acre and a half of land behind walls of rock and adobe. For years Ephraim was known as Little Denmark, as was Spring City, and even in 1936 I heard Ephraim referred to as Copenhagen. There used to be more Danish spoken there than English, but in these days, even with a superfluity of Scandinavian surnames, regretfully Danish ways and the Danish tongue have died out. There is only a futile nostalgia left of both. Firm communities on Pleasant Creek and at Allreds could not be established until 1859, when both Anglos and Danes filtered back. South of Manti, settlement took even longer. Not until the 1860s, and even into the 70s was there much penetration into the Gunnison Valley and to the valley of the Sevier River. People from both Manti and Springville pierced the Utes heartland, and the fierce Blackhawk War in that period was fought over the whole length and breadth of the Territory south of Provo, involving eventually even some Navajos in the extreme south. The incident was sparked by a hassle over some horses that old John Lowry, Sr. accused an Indian of having taken without Johns permission. John whipped him off the back of the horse the Indian was sitting on before he realized what was happening, and, as I understand it, he gave that Ute the whipping of his life right in the midst of a solemn meeting on the subject of pilfered livestock. This was on a Sunday afternoon, April 9, 1865, and this conduct of Bishop Lowry was followed by a visit of the Indians to Jim Tooths house, where Chief Black Hawk was enjoying a Sunday dinner, following church services. They called Black Hawk to the door and told him the story. Instantly, all Indians disappeared from Manti, including Black Hawk, who presumably refused Sister Tooths dessert to lead his people into the mountains. The guerrilla war that ensued for six or seven years was to be called Black Hawks War, and it gave the Territorial Militia a lot of exercise and justification. It was not finally settled until 1872, although Black Hawk washed his hands of it in 1867, and a peace treaty was agreed upon in 1868 at Ephraim. The Uintah Basin saw most of the action after that. Black Hawk had been one of Jesse Foxs students in that very first log schoolhouse in Manti in September 1850, so he was well enough known in Manti, and he knew everybody there just as well. The Manti fort understood beyond a doubt that hostilities had begun when every Indian dropped out of sight. ot Farmers Shop I FA Stores City Dwellers can too! Products of farm proven dependability. volume buying power. Products moderately priced because of Theres something for every household at IFA Stores. 20-Sto- Can your hybrid meet the Spring Paint Special Superstar Challenge? You know the challenge of getting higher yields can only be met with an open mind and a willingness to try new practices and new hybrids. EXTRA Long Life Paints NK HYBRID CORN hybrids challenge your present hybrid on yield and overall performance. Plant them together, treat them the same. We believe you will see NK hybrids come out on top. 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Temple Block, They had been too busy fighting Indians, disease, grasshoppers, and plain starvation to plan very far into Eternity. Having constructed the Little Fort in 1852 on the northwest quarter of Block 64, where Nathaniel Beachs old cabin of that day still stands; they built the Log Fort in the same trta a year later, and then in 1854 they erected their Big l ort, which enclosed nine square blocks from Second South to First North, and from First East to Second West. Its walls were 12 feet high, 3 feet wide at the bottom, and 2 feet wide at the top. They were made of rock, large adobe bricks, small ambes, and in some places just thick masses of mud in the Spanish style. Regretfully, there is nothing left of it to show. As people do anywhere, in early Manti too they kept life coming into the world, as well as departing from it. We have already seen that Alameda Hashburn could not wait, born as she was on the banks of Manti Creek on November 20, 1849. The first white boy to be born in southern Utah held off until March 5, 1850. His name was Cyrenus Taylor, and he didn't exactly miss that first winter, but he was not in much of a spot I" cry about it. After that, babies started coming more regularly, but the was a red-in- k account, and thats not good Mormon neither for birthrates nor accounting. If more imhad not come from 1850-othey might very well more people than they gained. Relations with Indians in this frontier outpost of Mormon settlement were never easy. Awkward wouldhave todescribe most of the contacts. Although accepting the Indian readily in the Book of Lamanites enough as of the people called Mormon, the white pioneer was essentially an iron-agagriculturally sedentary European, who did not reconcile his ways easily with the neolithic Indian culture of the Sanpete fold on the frontiers Valley in 1849. The of Deseret naturally had all of the 19th century concepts, including the prejudices, of the Indian, and all of their feelings about the red man were complicated by the felt necessity of defending themselves daily from one form or another of Indian hostility. On the Indians part, he was equally confused, if not more so. Unable to comprehend the mores of the white man, .guorant of the history and motives of Mormon society, he was nevertheless frequently impressed with Mormon honesty, ingenuity, and general behavior. He frequently gave help in emergencies, and he received help in turn for emergencies of his own. He recognized white scoundrels here and there, but even Walker was able and willing to check them off with a matching list of red ones. If the settlers were in a daily state of concern for their very lives and limbs, the Indians fear was deeper for loss of his freedom to more and live as he was accustomed to in his own land. In 1849, despite what Walker, Arropine, or Sanpete may have said, he was not yet prepared to accept the white mans sedentary agriculture as a way of life. He could not understand the European preoccupation with ownership of personal property, and it was not unusual at Manti for the Indian to stable his ponies whimsically in the white mans barns without permission, considering as he did that all good things, such as barns, to be the common property of all men in need. Nor did he always understand why the Mormonee women screamed like bald eagles or attacked him with fire pokers or frying pans when he entered his white friends cabin without knocking. Knocking on a door to request entrance was as foreign to the Ute as washing dishes and shaking hands, although in the latter case it must have occurred to the more observant among them that at least momentarily, when one is shaking hands the warclub is idled by necessity. Despite difficulties, and there were many, there were some records of easy contacts. Jhmes P. Brown bought a thirteen-year-ol- d Piute Indian boy from the Utes for twenty-fiv- e dollars in order to rescue the boy from a life of slavery. This was either in 1849 or 1850. He raised the boy as a member of his own family, and more than once the boy repaid Brother James kindness by smoothing over ruffled relations between red and white. Christened Alma, he was better known to the people of Manti as Shock, possibly in some form of anglicization of his Piute name. A knoll west of Manti, in t rthrate piactice, migrants have lost n, e, Manti Messenger-Ephrai- Thursday, May 1, m Enterprise 1975 As a Dodges canyon, is still known as Shocks Knoll. man, Shock earned his living herding sheep, and he was accustomed to sitting on top of the knoll to watch his herd. In time, Shock was married to an Indian girl named Betsy, and the couple had two daughters, both of whom died young. He made at least one known journey to the Missouri River to accompany Mormon emigrants to Utah. Shock was eventually buried with his white folks in the Manti Cemetery, and for many years some Manti people used to place flowers upon his Indian paintbrush. grave annually--alway- s Other contacts formed squall lines of human interest. A good story which makes the rounds still these days is one that involves some romantic notions of Chief Walker. This is becoming somewhat legendary with the overtelling, but undoubtedly it happened someway. However, I am not sure today which girls name to involve. Some say it was a Mary and the record tells us that James P. had a daughter Brown, named Mary Ann Brown. But others are just as certain that it was Mary Lowry, daughter of the Bishop. Whichever one it was, Walker, not an unhandsome man himself, looked upon her as something more than just a woman. She was sky and earth, sunlight and rain, she was coolness in July and fire in December. This was Mary Mary Somebody. Whatever her surname, the great Ute Warehief Walker was oblivious of everything about her but herself. I do not know whether Walker knew he had a rival or not. Walker was not very settled, and he may not have known about the other one, although he certainly must have known him or Walker, was a Timpanoag Ute, personally. renowned as known to other tribes, Spanish rancheros, and all the mountain men between the Snake River plains and California, between the Wind River mountains and Chihuahua--raide- r, fighter, trader, andmember extraordinary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Da- y Saints. He had no particularly exciting reputation as a lover. But in 1853 he fell in h Mary. The other man was George Peacock. In Manti for three years, he was a convert and gentlemen of English ancestry, a property-holde- r already, justice of the peace, and the first postmaster of Manti. In the current events of 1853 he was considered a man of no less courage than Walker, and there was little doubt that he had a longer life expectancy, barring ambushes and other normal hazards of frontier life. Walker assured Mary on the big day of his proposal that she would not have to haul his water and hew his wood as his other wives were compelled to, but that he would keep her warm and comfortable in a cabin in Manti. The story has it that, except for one older and helpless person, Mary was alone at home, and this must have lent a little excitement to the event. W alker spoke tenderly of his passion, telling Mary about all the good things that could lay instore. There was no denying his sincerity, and no one should belittle any mans serious intentions, and Mary did not do so. Not only was he obviously sincere, but Mary was scared, and she was in no position to take issue or laugh about it. In her tender s, she kept amazingly cool and calm as she deliverated a way out. Walker is said to have stood well over six feet tall and to have had the regal bearing of an eagle looking down from the top of a tall fir. Without much obvious thought about it, Mary found herself informing the Chief that she was suddenly highly honored and touched, but that she was already married. A frosty belt of icy air suddenly blew into the room. Walker, momentarily stunned, recovered to drive his steel trading post knife a few inches into Marys fathers native-hew- n table top and to demand to know pointedly who the husband was. He was no fool. His tenderness turned to temper as he realized that Mary had lied. It has not been written or told exactly what he expected Mary to do when confronted with this dilemma, but the Chief was not prepared for her reply. George Peacock. I view this moment as a dramatic one of exciting comedy. Her eyes must have been the size of a couple of moons, but she said it. George Peacock. (To be continued) Wal-ka-r- a, love--wit- mid-teen- |