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Show MANTI MESSENGER 2 46 Thursday, March 6, M 1975 View from the Red Point a popularized View from the Red Point, Note: account of the beginnings of Utah, by Albert Antrei, is being published serially in the Manti Messenger and Ephraim Enterprise. A significant historical document, View from the Red Point is fascinating reading. Readers will likely want to clip each installment and combine them at the completion of publication into a complete narrative.) (Editors South-Centr- al Should the Pilgrim Elder, Governor William Bradford, and the Mormon President, Governor Brigham Young, ever have occasion to come wherever they may be today, they should have much to talk about. There are some striking similarities in the somewhat pugnaciously religious settlement of both New England and Utah. The participants of both colonizing efforts wanted to separate themselves from existing Establishments in their homelands. In the process, neither sought necessarily to forget where he came from. In both cases the people were family people, not adventurers looking for gold or fountains of youth. Both were zealously inspired by religious faith of uncommon intensity. Both were soaked deeply, beyond the length of their shovel handles, in that old, somewhat faded glory we refer to the work ethic. They were all today as Both have been criticized for a lack of tolerance of strangers in their midst, and the standing order of any of their days was unquestioning obedience to authority. In both cases they referred to themselves as Saints, and in both cases their initial, humble little settlements served as hubs, around which other small settlements mushroomed in due time. Neither was in that happy state that can make some of us today believe that wilderness is necessary for the preservation of our Society, for they did not need to travel far to find it. In fact, to them travel in the wilderness was a hard necessity, not recreation, and indeed, if there were no academic students of geography among them, they must be forgiven, for they practiced geography daily, as they practiced everything their feet, their lives, and their immortal souls. Finally, if Elder Bradford had his King Phillip, his Massassoit, his Samoset,and his Squanto, Brother Brigham had his Walker, his Aropeen, his Tabinaw, and his Sanpete. Let us speak now of a remote Plymouth, an outpost settleUtah. Let us speak ment between the mountains of of the domestication of a wild, neolithic land of 1849, a land of milk, if not of honey. In the beginning there was only the Word, and it was the Word of Brigham Young, the Lion of the Lord, in the howling wilderness. It did not rumble down the side of the Wasatch Mountains and Plateau like thunder, and it did not have the savor of a burning bush, but even the Children of Laman, the Indians, bided whenever he spoke. Brother Brigham did a lot of listening too, and he had his own way of cocking an ear, especially whenever he thought he was listening to something inspired by the Lord. For instance, he was inspired to study Fremonts maps and papers. In 184S, at Winter Quarters, he listened to Father Peter John De Smet, S.J., and a year later he listened to that reprobate mountain man, Jim Bridger. So, it is not really any great wonder that in 1849 he listened to the Ute, Walker, and all five of his brothers, and they told him about a distant, remote valley in their heartland to the south that Walker called for his brother, Sanpete, or something like that. That valley was a great holding corral for the hundreds of horses they stole annually in California and Mexico, but now he wanted the Mormonee, Walker said, to go to that valley to live and to teach Sanpete's people how to grow crops. About ten years before, he said, he had dreamed about the Mormonee. and when they came he was inclined to be confused, but friendly. Nobody forgot exactly that Walker was a known doubletalker, and all that about a dream was hard to quote, much less to swallow. That was one of the few friendly things Walker ever said to anybody, and maybe even Walker wondered later why he had said it. He was not always that friendly thereafter, but Brigham and his people for reasons of their own listened anyway. You might say. Marvelous are the ways of the Lord! ' Brigham was never the one to let hot irons cool, so he sent scouts to that valley to check out the land, the wood, and the water. Walker showed the way there himself to Brighams scouts, Joe Horn, W. W. Phelps, Ira Willis, and Dimick B. Huntington. Parley P. Pratt also got into the act someway, and he drove a stake into the ground somewhere ahead of time, at the town site. Brother Parley poked around southern Utah quite a lot. The scouts reached that place on August 20, 1849, and in the pleasant warmth of midsummer they liked what they saw. The Lamanites threw a big feast for them there, and the Chiefs, Walker and Sanpete, probably gave big speeches. The scouts glowed their way back to the Salt Lake Valley to report favorably to President Young by September 1. It is said, Brother Brigham sought out Brethren Isaac Morley, Seth Taft, and Charles Shumway at Church conference time in went out, and in those days October. After that, the Call went out it vibrated the timbers of all the whenever the Call cabins in the Salt Lake Valley. Two hundred and twenty-fou- r men, women, and children answered it with 240 but most head of cattle, 40 wagons ( a few of them horse-drawof them some sheep, dogs and cats, a few chickens, which was their word for and groceries. provisions, They left the Salt Lake Valley on October 28. Other than a little crude furniture, some tools, and some farming implements, personal belongings could not have added up to much more than men could put in their pockets. It was a tight little train, down to the last stitch and the last mouth. Nothing was plentiful. What they weren't shorten they didnt have at all. Nothing was plentiful, that is, except what they called their Faith. Their wagons had to be bursting at the seams with that, and maybe that was one reason they didn't miss a lot of other things that just wouldn't fit into their boxes and wagon-bedWell, I suppose they were not all exactly alike tn the matter of faith no more than they were all exactly alike in anv thing face-to-fa- Anglo-Saxon- south-centr- s. al oxen-yoked- ), . 95 else. Where some of them needed their wagons for their faith alone, it should not be unreasonable to imagine that there were those too who could tuck their faith into a corner of a wagon or into a saddlebag Anyway, they geed and hawd their oxen and horses together through the Jordan Narrows and along the base of the Wasatch Mountains for about two weeks, until they got to that snowy peak they were to name Mount Nebo. Here they turned left, following Brother Brighams instructions, up the steep, narrow canyon cut by Salt Creek. They dug, filled, chopped, t, and shoved a road up that canyon and mile after weary mile. All the way, somebody wrote, they were harassed by Utes, who had probably learned that the Mormonee preferred feeding them to fighting. You didnt need apostolic revelation to read the Utes right about it. Their empty, extended hands were just one motion removed from a weapon, and on these grounds, with women and children obvious in all the wagons. Train Captain Nelson Higgins and Patriarch Isaac Morley handed out food instead of resistance. You might say, it paid off, for the policy got them to their high valley without anybody getting himself unnecessarily killed. But the Mormons were not Quakers, and the Utes knew it, for they were not too confused about this policy of the Mormon settlers in the long run. It was common sensei and the policy continued as long as the white mans guns and manpower were short and the Indians hunger was long. All through the Salt Creek Canyon the men did all of the work, and while they did their women picked up the reins or the bullwhip. They may have thought their men didnt notice, but they did. George Washington Bradley did, anyway. He told many years later how his Betsy held the reins to his strong team in one hand while holding on to an infant son in her right arm, and with her feet regulating the behavior of a son. They tell me several more of her children were under the wagons canvas, and she hollered at them from time to time about one thing or another. She want a liberated with considerable authority. d but she woman, Wagons were let down gullies one at a time, restrained by ropes and the arms, legs, and shoulders of the men. Up the other side, their beasts had to be helped often in the same way. which As Train Captain, Nelson Higgins oyez, oyez. sounded to little Adelia Cox like Oh yes. Oh yes, jerked them dawn. out of their short slumbers at every Isaac Morley, however, was the acknowledged Leader of the train, in both spiritual and temporal matters. At sixty-thre- e he was no Spring chicken. Sometimes he was called President and once in a while he was referred to as Father Morley, White on top like old Mount Nebo itself, his sharp Morley. eyes got the truth out of you like facing up a steep, roadless If it wasnt in you, you backed off. canyon with an They all sort of looked to Brother Isaac to make the impossible decisions, and that included Captain Nels Higgins. Some grumbled, I would guess, but they all took least, they all did until ld gee-haw- A Dane named Christopher Madsen built these rock structures, but not much else is known Fences and orchards and corrals were removed ago for a baseball field, now also abandoned. two adjacent about them. many years The smaller frost-crackli- at January. about the middle of the Salt Creek Canyon, where some had leveled off the canyon into a flat, they drew up at Isaac Morleys orders. From here he sent Seth Taft, D. B. Shomaker ahead Thope Huntington, Charles Shumway, and to scout. It was a good time and place too to give the train some needed rest. Even before their scouts returned, however, they moved on again, and the going above the forks got no easier. They moved boulders and cut trees to make roadways; they opened the brush, and they leveled off steep banks so they wouldnt roll their wagons off those sidehills. The scouts were gone longer than expected. It was getting to the point where they were accustomed to invoke the Lords aid more than usually, when one night they identified in the distance the boisterous laughter of seventeen-year-ol- d Theophilus Thope Shomaker. Only a few of the scouting party returned. The rest of them were waiting up in the valley for the emigrant train to come up. A November rain, cold and hard, struck them. They would have taken it in stride, except that Nelson Higgins baby got sick, and Mary Lowry, who must have been about thirteen, broke an ankle. They had no doctors along, and whenever one of them got sick or hurt they usually knew only two things to do. The first thing they always did about any crisis was to pray about it and ask counsel, and the second thing they did was to lay hands on it. Nobody knows today who set Marys ankle, but likely it was the strong hands of her own father, John Lowry, Sr. W ith Nels baby it was something else; there was nothing to lay hands on, except perhaps the babys head in prayer. They prayed, they sympathized, and they did what they could to comfort it and its mother, Nancy Behunin Higgins. But before every sun, Train Captain Higgins never missed a rising to call out his Oyez, oyez! Yoke up! Yoke up! They fought their way out of the canyon to the high pass into the Sanpete Valley on or about November 17. The valley lay ahead of them, hard against the snowy crisp and misty-we- t d Wasatch Plateau. heights of the For over twenty miles their oxen and teams tugged their wagons through brushy flats and across spongy bottomlands that bogged them a little here and there. They crossed Sanpetes little stream somewhere between where gurgling, summer-shrun- k Moroni and Chester are located today. In the saltgrass flats and swampy bottoms they probably startled flocks of wild ducks and crossed the valley amidst the honking of southbound geese. Sanpetes river was probably a more respectable stream for size then than it is today, for the Indians didnt use a drop of it on the land. One of their stops was at the big spring from which Fountain Green was to draw its name; another was on the banks of the river where Moroni is. All across the lower part of the valley their wagons slipped, swayed, and stuck a little in the mud. They found the rest of their scouts near the springs discovered for them by Charles Shumway and known to this day as His bubbling waters consisted of a number Shumways Springs. of flowing wells, feeding the marshes to the west gluttonously , and the place was everything Brother Charles said it was, and In forks cloud-layere- maybe a little more. Apparently Sanpetes people were well aware of the springs too, for there were horse and tiavois trails going east from there, climbing up into the mouth of a willow and cedar sheltered canyon of the 10,000-foo- t plateau to the east. All through the valley they had noticed Indian ponies and their unshod tracks, as free as the occasional muledeer they saw bounding through the brushy bottoms. Brother Charles pointed the springs out to them as though he had invented them. Now some of them began to feel that this was the end of their journey, and they commenced to sigh in relief. But Brother Dimick B. Huntington knew better, and Brother Isaac said flatly: No, This is not it. At that, some of them got grumpy, especially Shumway, Taft, Higgins, and Jake Butterfield. But the Patriarch was more adamant than all of them put together, and besides that he was the Authority, and so that was that! spur of that plateau Instead, Isaac pointed to a grey-hill- y sticking out into the valley about five miles farther south That is the end of our journey, he told them. They looked at it, and they looked at each other, and then they looked at it again. They were looking for something green and something that would hold water, and what they saw ahead of them must have looked more like a jackrabbit lookout than a place to raise homes for Gods children. They may have been an obedient people, but they were all with such things as Magna Cartas and Declarations of Independence and Bills of Rights running through their veins with their corpuscles, and a lot of them were hardheaded Yankees on top of that, and some of them werent about to let even a Patriarch push them around. They argued about that place. Seth Taft, a former bishop, said something to the effect that this is just a long canyon thats good for nothin but jackrabbits. . Theres a better and wider valley to the south Maybe he had talked with some Indians, or with Parley P. Pratt, but he was surely cussed about it. There is some talk that the words uttered by Jake Butterfields mouth were even more to the point Maybe it was just a coincidence, but close to the hill he had pointed to, Isaac Morley jerked Parley Pratts stake out of the ground, and he held it up triumphantly for everybody to see, and that settled it. Brother Isaac told them, Im staying here if only He was a Yankee too, and he laid it ten of you stay with me. right on the line. Well, that would not have made a bad little colony in itself, since just Brother Isaac alone had two wives with him and eleven children. Anyhow, they looked around them and decided to stay for two reasons - they had no other place to go, really, and added to that it made them feel a little uncomfortable to be washed off the hands of a Patriarch of the Church As there often is when you talk about things that happened a long lime ago, there is a little difference of opinion as to the exact day that they put down their last camp, the day they ended their long trek from the banks of the mighty Missouri to the much lesser banks of the humble Sanpete. Some say it was on November 19, and the others say it wasnt until the 22nd. In a case such as this you have to look for what the professional historian might call original sources. Sometime in the comfortable 1920s, Adelia Cox (Sidwell), who had been there at the age of nine years, wrote, Arriving on the 19th of November at the present site of Manti, the entire company camped on the creek. She said a council was heldabout staying or going farther south, and I get a tight little feeling that Isaac Morley resolved it then and there with Parley P. Pratts stake in his hand A Manti Messenger of unmarked date of a number of years ago also quoted from the Church Chronology, page 85, that On November 19 a company under . . Morley, Taft, and Shumway located near the present site of Manti The difference of opinion is undoubtedly honest One may speculate. It is an established fact that there was some haggling about the location of their future community, and it is not impossible that a few of them took a day or two to nurse some wounded feelings back to normal at Shumways Springs. There may be another explanation: the Bradley family biography says . that Brother Seth Taft raced ahead of the main party and had started building his log house when the others arrived. It was a long time between 1849 and the 1920s, and Sister Adelias memory could easily have overlooked somebody either at the Springs or on the Creek. But she did mention that Isaac Morleys cabin was the first one up, whether Taft started first or not. As a matter of fact, Taft was no better than Number Four, if the Bradleys are to be taken seriously, for they insist that the main competition was between George Bradley and Titus Billings. Abraham Washburn's second wife had a babv on Vnywav. November 20. and I am reasonablv sine that it wasn t born until Brother be's wheels had stopped rolling, for theie was no mention of it anv where along the Hail That is the wav it looks to me out here on the Red Point, and that is whv I sm t of go along with the November 19 date more than anv other It was more than certain that that hill and the sloping sagebrush alluvium they camped on did not look muihlikea dreamy site for homes The Indians lived the i all light I'heir wickiups were visible in an auh from that stonv hill to the Red Point, and manv smokes fiom then lodgefnes weie i oiling up into the brisk November air But to those two hundied and twenty four men. women, and children on that law dav the site was a poor substitute for Nauvoo the Beautiful fter crossing the wide, sealike plains of Nebiaska and Wyoming, and after some of them having lived in the widei Salt Lake Nall ey for over a year, theie lould have been a little feeling of claustrophobia, as Nelli Iafl had intimated I'hcv could see in only two directions, not counting up and down diy mountain range rose about 3000 feel above the valley to the west of them, and this effeclivelv blocked out ( aliforma and the gold diggin's in that dnecliun. and theie were about .0(10 feet of towering forested plateau on the east to block out an unfriendly U.S.A. That was besides a thousand miles of deset I and Rocky Mountains east of that plateau, and almost as many miles of Great Basin and Sierra Nevadas west of that West Range That made them almost content, because they had had enough of mobs and hanging governors, although no doubt some of them may have felt that the Lord had dropped them into a brushy hole. There was a chill wind blowing from the ninth, and Brother Isaac suggested that everybody get to the shelter of the south side of that hill. They were all pretty tired, and even a north wind could not budge some of them from their camp on the creek Only when the lowering clouds began to turn to snowbanks did they all forget their free agency" to stay on the creek band and oined Brother Isaac on the south side of the stony hill. It laid down three feet of snow in just a couple of days. Right there in the valley, in November, it snowed three feet! They measured it, and thirty three inches on the level is close enough to three feet to call it that. Vou can bet they wondered if Anglo-Saxon- s, "... . . -- . . ... . , g This remnant cabin is believed to have been erected by M. Works in the 1860s, Mr. Works was a brother-in-laof Brigham Young and received the first telegraph message in Manti on December 28, 1866. The message was James w from Brother Brigham. The logs are hewed, and not as natural as those in the older log cabin of Nathaniel Beachs on Main Street. by Albert Antrei, 1971 -- d place was occupied for a while by Charlie Hill, a Indian, and his white wife. The upstairs hall was used as late as World War II days as a dance hall. by Albert Antrei, 1971 half-bree- all the winters were going to be that way, and they received their reassurance from the Indians, who said No, this was unusually bad. They bucked all that snow with men and boys, shoveling it in windrows so that their critters could get what feed there was by a little pawing Other men went into the cottonwood bottoms of the creek to cut logs for a few of the first houses. They hesitated in their labor only five times, not counting the Sabbath. The first time was when they welcomed Alameda Washburn into the world on November 20, and she was the first white baby and the first white girl to be born in Deseret south of Provosts traditig post. No sooner did Abraham Washburns wheels stop rolling on the creek bank than Alameda announced her arrival. The second pause was sadder. They buried Nelson Higgins baby. The third time was on December 18, when they laid seventeen-year-ol- d Theophilus Shomaker in his grave somewhere, known only to them and to God. It was probably pneumonia that took Thope that suddenly. The fourth time was when John Warner's baby made it into the world dead, and the fifth lime was when lohn fables year-ol- d daughter died. They lost all of those children before Spring could arrive to thaw the snow and the first few inches of the frozen ground. After that November snowfall it didnt seem to snow too much, for by February Brother Isaac could write to Brother Brigham that there were only a few inches left on the ground They no sooner got their boots to drying good by a fire before Parley Pratt showed up again. Let Elizabeth Crawford Munk tell about that He was in command of an exploring party going south to the Rio Virgin. He needed more men. M. D. llambleton, John Lowry, Jr., Gardner Potter, Sylvester llulett and Edward Everett (or Averett?) volunteered and went on with Apostle Pratt to a little place called Little Salt Lake Valley. The main camp was where Palawan (sic) is now located. Of these five men, three of them, John Lowry, Jr., llambleton, and Potter crossed the mountains on snow shoes and did not reach home until February. The other two . . did not get home until April The truth of the matter is, the settlers in Sanpete were a little short on manpower too, but there was no inclination to argue the point with Brother Parley. The first log house they built was for the Patriarch and his family, and they got this up by December 1. It was not an architectural prize. It had no windows, and it had a dirt floor, but it was dry and snug, and on the day it was completed the ten or eleven Morley children had friends over to celebrate, including Vdelia Co , who lived to tell about that too almost a hundred years later. The new logs were white and clean, and the shavings, bark, and chips from them helped to warm the party by the . . . fireplace After that, it was too close to know for sure whose log house got up next. Titus Billings, Seth Taft, and George Bradley were all in there making log chips fly. They helped each other roll up their log cabins, and by February 15 they had twenty of them up. Some of the settlers just stayed in their wagons, and some others found they could dig caves into the side of that hill There was an awful lot of British stiff upper lip about that first winter in thief Sanpete's Valley. Besides the flu and and measles and helping the Indians get over lung disease their sicknesses too, provisions were slim, and it was a long time before a harvest could be expected. Not only did they feed themselves, but they fed the Indians too, so picking out a dozen or so men they sent them on a winter trip back to the Salt Lake Valley with five wagons to fill. Two of them belonged to George Bradley, two to Augustus Dodge, and one to Jereel Shomaker We can only presume they were Their captain was Jerome Bradley, who had just turned nineteen years old lerome took on the job as though he had inherited it. and he moved them through to the Salt Lake Valley without much reflection on his lack of experience. He didn't let themstop to rest at the I tah Fort, the new little place on the site of Etienne Provost's cabins. In Salt Lake City Jerome made his needs known to the General Authorities, and then he walked ten miles farther north to Sessions Settlement, which is called Bountiful" these days. There he visited with his sister. Vmanda, who had just been married the autumn before to Daniel Ilenrie. He talked them into coming to the Sanpete Settlement just for the winter, so that Amanda could visit with her mother. They were fond of George Washington Bradley too, but George was really their uncle, their dead father s (Thomas Jefferson Bradley's) brother, who had married their mother. George was such a good stepfather to both of them, however, that they had a little trouble not thinking of him as then-reafather. Daniel had a fine team of big horses and a good wagon, and that was just what was needed to help pack in a few more groceries. It sounded like a good idea to both Amanda and Daniel, especially Amanda, so Daniel tacked things down for the winter and loaded his wagon in Salt Lake t'itv with the other five They made it to the I tah Fort, forty miles south, in a couple of davs, and this time they stopped to rest. Belter stay a while." somebody advised them. Theres Injuns all the way to Salt Creek. With all those needed supplies stocked in their wagons they were not looking for trouble, so they camped right there for two weeks until the outriders gave the r. Meanwhile, the wagoneers managed to acquire two more hands in the persons of Tabinaw and who happened to be two more brothers of Walker and Sanpete. From there on the Shomaker wagon, which was in much better mechanical shape than those of Biadle.v and Dodge really began to roll and gradually drew out of sight. Daniel llenrie's was in good shape too, and it was wagon pulled by hoises, but Daniel held his rig in to with the Bradleys. stay It began to snow as soonas the wagons reached the mouth of Salt Creek Canyon, and as soon as they turned to climb up into their own downtrailof a few weeks before, the snow became thick, wet, and heavy, the kind that slacks up y the minute. It took them three days to make the six miles cr a6out halfway up the canyon, by 1850. The lone Shomaker wagon had managed to pull into the Sanpete Valley by that time and made it into the Settlement almost as the storm broke, miles ahead of the other nearly thirty-fiv- e five. Those at the forks immediately began to accumulate serious problems. The first one was the snow itself, which proceeded to fall continually for about three weeks and covered up everything, including the wood supply in the creek bottoms. The storm handicapped them in hunting for meat too. n. l n' Bradley-llenrie-Dod- Bradley-llenrie-Dod- 1 (Continued next week) |
