by Bill Graves
Afton’s twenty-one-year-old daughter greets me at the front door. She called her dad from the basement, where he and his wife work much of the day. It’s probably best described as their window less sorting-assembling-packing-mailng room.
Waiting for Afton to climb the stairs, his daughter told me that she was just days away from going to Japan on an eighteen-month missionary assignment. A book she was reading said that Japan, not quite twice the size of Utah, has a population density of 863 people per square mile.
“How does that compare with Utah?” I asked, expecting a wild guess.
“Utah has 20 people per square mile as of the 1990 census,” she replied, as if I had just asked for the time of day.
Afton appeared in the kitchen and invited me to take a seat at the table. Only after he knew me well enough, that is. Having lived his entire life in this small town, he knows everybody who knocks on his front door. I was an unknown, a curiosity as much as anything. Not that Afton did not trust me. I think by nature he trusts everybody. It was just that I was somebody new to get to know.
After hearing about my travels in the motor home, he pushed aside a stack of mail and began telling me about the ant business. “This whole thing started over twenty-five years ago. We were collecting biological specimens for laboratories, which expanded into packaging different kinds of rocks and fossils for school science classes and the like. Then some big retail chains were looking for someone to supply ants to folks who bought ant farms in their stores,” Afton explained.
I interrupted, “I remember buying one of those for my kids. It was a plastic box, about the size of book, right?”
Afton nodded. “Some are bigger. Anyway, packed with every farm is a coupon good from some ants. So they send that in, and I air-mail them a package of ants in a vial. We get flooded with orders at Christmas when kids get these ant farms and want them all up and running at the same time. Ants go out of here by the thousands. I even have to go out of town to find ‘em on cold days.”
Afton shuns publicity and has turned down attractive invitations from a long list of TV talk shows. He got up from his seat to pull a letter from some cookbooks on the kitchen counter. Postmarked 1991, it was from The Tonight Show. I suppose Afton was flattered and probably amazed that people find his work so interesting. But he told Johnny Carson no, and Jay Leno, too. And many more since.
As we talked, little kids passed silently through the kitchen, one at a time, headed for the basement. Afton paid no attention. One came up the stairs munching the remains of a cookie, which explained the stream of small-foot traffic.
After we toured the basement, it was time for an ant roundup. I was about to watch one of the few people in the world who does it.
We took off in Afton’s pickup. During the summer, he does his collecting early in the morning when it is cool. During the winter, he gets what he needs in a couple of hours before noon. He collects only red harvester ants. They are the most active and plentiful ants here. If kept cool, they can survive without water for about three days, the normal shipping time.
Afton knows all the anthills around Hurricane. Each one, he said, shelters 5,000 to 50,000 ants. The first one we stopped at looked quiet to me.
On his hands and knees, Afton leaned forward and inserted a soda straw into the hole of the anthill. He then blew on the straw, which apparently created breezy turmoil in the ant colony. Out poured the ants. He rounded up a bunch, blowing them gently with his straw into a tin scoop. He took only a few before we moved to the next anthill. We returned home with maybe a thousand ants in mason jars.
With Afton’s ant harvest in for the day, he now must ready for shipment some pressed wildflowers and tadpole-shrimp eggs. School science classes are the primary customers for those. So I headed into town. Afton pointed me toward city hall, where his son Clark has been city manager for the past thirteen years.
Clark answered the question that has been gnawing at me since I first heard of Hurricane.
“Hurricanes, as in weather, do not occur around here. What happened was, a gust of wind blew away the top of Erastus Snow’s buggy, which was being lowered off the cliff behind me.” Clark pointed over his shoulder. “That was in 1865, so who knows for sure what really happened. Anyway, Snow said something about the wind being a hurricane.”
Since Snow was an important elder in the Mormon Church, what he said was considered noteworthy. Apparently, someone thought the “hurricane” comment was too. So the cliffs got the name, and the town picked it up later.
Curiously, people here don’t pronounce the word like you and I do. They call it “Hurrican,” with a soft a. In fact, many other words here sounded strange. A tongue-in-cheek glossary someone gave me was of help: People “pork cores in coreparts” and never put the “court before the harse,” eat “cormel carn,” shop at the “morket,” or visit Disneyland in “Califarnia.”
The accent is obvious and makes it easy to tell the natives from the newcomers. It is linked to the colorful potpourri of people who sett led here. Among the first were cotton growers, who were bonafide Southerners. Add to these the Europeans—Swiss, Scandinavians and English—who settled nearby St. George. Then came the miners at Silver Reef, who added mixing Chinese, Irish, Scottish, Cornish, and other languages and dialects. All melted into one culture, local speech sounds like it was “barn in a born.”
The center of town is the Pioneer Heritage Park and Museum, a first-class exhibit. It is typical of what I have seen so often in Utah. Steeped in the traditions of the Mormon Church, people here demonstrate a deep respect for their pioneer ancestors.
The early explorers of the West—Lewis and Clark and others—have been given due credit for their brave accomplishments. Towns, rivers, even babies have been named after them. The pioneers were different. They were ordinary folks who left relative security to settle this country. They risked everything they had, including the lives of their families. Drawing the first map certainly took courage, but filling it in took much more. That’s what the pioneers did.
In the park, I sat among flowers in the shade of a tall monument topped with the statue of a pioneer family. I wondered if future generations in Utah or anywhere else will create monuments to my generation and others of the twentieth century. Perhaps they already have, if war memorials are to be our monuments.
48
“Catfish” Charlie on Butch Cassidy
Leeds, Utah
“Butch Cassidy died right were you’re settin’.” I squirmed in my chair. “No way!”
“Well…a log-cabin inn was here then.” “Catfish” Charlie Scott rapped the table with his cigarette lighter, as if to pinpoint the spot.
“I saw on PBS one time, some anthropologists were looking for his bones in Bolivia.”
“But they didn’t find him, did they? Because he’s not buried there. He’s buried around here somewhere.”
Were we playing poker, I would peg Charlie as a poor bluffer with a good hand. He had this smirk on his face. It’s probably always there, like the straw hat that he never takes off. His wife tells him the hat is worn out and should be thrown away. But Charlie won’t, saying it is just now becoming him.
I played into Charlie’s hand. “I was told that he is buried up near Beaver, and that’s less than a hundred miles from here.”
“Could be. Butch was born in Beaver, you know.” It was too early for Charlie’s dinner house to open, so we engaged in a good bit of uninterrupted talk. He left the table once to put potatoes in the oven. Catfish Charlie’s, the only place around here to buy a meal, does not open until 4:00 P.M. He cooks the dinners. his daughter serves them. A few people order chicken tenders or buffalo shrimp, but everyone else eats deep-fried, farm-raised Mississippi catfish and hush pup pies.
“Two houses down,” Charlie continued, “is where the Sundance Kid was livin’ at the time. His real name was Harry Loungabaugh, but he didn’t use that here.” Charlie pointed over his shoulder with an unlit cigarette he had been hol
ding for a long while. “He used the name Hyman Beebee. People tell that he would pull a six-gun on kids if they got on his lawn.”
“When was that?”
“Late thirties, I guess.”
Since he moved to Leads three years ago, Charlie has been researching Utah’s best-known outlaws. Butch Cassidy and his gang, called the Wild Bunch, became infamous around the turn of the century. They robbed banks and trains in south-central Utah and elsewhere.
Charlie has an 1877 Colt 45 that he claims belonged to Kid Curry, one of the Wild Bunch. “I’m gunna have it in a nice glass case and put a price on it: $29,995. I know I ain’t gunna sell it, but folks always want a price on things, especially things they can’t have.”
Although he has lived in Utah most of his fifty-five years, Charlie brought his accent with him from Oklahoma, where he grew up. Charlie says he “loves people to death,” which may explain his immediate acceptance here in Leeds and his status as acting mayor.
Pointing to a row of fourteen cups hanging over the door, he started reciting the names of each owner. Charlie comes in every morning at 6:00, even Mondays when the restaurant is closed, to make coffee for them. They don’t all show up, of course. Some live here only in the winter.
This town, like many others in the United States, took its name from somewhere else. A Mormon named it after Leeds, England, where he did missionary work.
There is one store here for everything. Cassidy’s sells earrings, nachos, magazines, firewood, fishing tackle, and more. It rents videos and a Rug Doctor and provides coin-operated entertainment, principally pool and video games. Around noon on Mondays and Saturdays, owner Brant Jones hauls out a charcoal grill and makes buffalo burgers out front.
This was Saturday. In spite of the midsummer heat, Brant was out there in the sun, spatula in hand, watching cheese melt over buffalo. The aroma caught me as I left Charlie Scott’s place.
Inside the store, Brant’s spouse Tiffey tended the cash register and their two children, who were in a playpen. An enormous buffalo head hung on the back wall. Like the meat on the grill, the head came from Colorado. It carried a price of $1,200.
Rounding out the Yellow Pages of Leeds, if there are any, is Lisa’s Corner Salon and a tidy RV park run by two hard-working ladies originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico. An art gallery is located in a house built by proprietor Joanne Thornton’s great-grandfather. Add the U.S. Post Office, and that’s it.
Leeds is a one-street town of trees and century-old homes, a few newer. Its ancestry is tied to nearby Silver Reef and Harrisburg. Both became ghost towns about the same time, but for different reasons. Their remains are now carefully preserved. Harrisburg is even fenced off and labeled. A new generation is moving in around them, bringing rock gardens, swimming pools, and the hum of air-conditioners.
49
Silver Oozed from the Rock
Harrisburg, Utah
A nearby newcomer, Interstate 15, runs through Utah from top to bottom. Its predecessor, Highway 91, passes through Leeds and goes on south three miles through the crumbling stone remains of Harrisburg. An RV resort has taken hold there. Respectful of their pioneer predecessors, developers have preserved the stone buildings of Harrisburg. Its old cemetery is restored, fenced in, and built around.
Harrisburg was never large nor prosperous. It peaked in 1868 with twenty-five families. Rocky ground gave them good material for building houses, but it was not much good for growing crops. Floods were all too common, as were swarms of grasshoppers. By the turn of the century, everybody had left.
Although Harrisburg did not last, a remarkable story that originated here is still alive. Every story out of the Old West seems to start with a freezing wind howling down the canyons. And that’s how it was one winter night when an old silver prospect or stopped for shelter at a farmhouse in Harrisburg. Invited in, a roaring fire drew him close to the sandstone fireplace. There he noticed drops of shining metal oozing from the rock. A closer look and he knew just what the metal was. Silver!
A ridge of rusty sandstone runs west of Harrisburg to the horizon. I assume the prospector got a fix on that ridge as the place where the fireplace builder got his rock. The fact that silver was there at all, geologists say, is a freak of nature. Silver in sandstone exists in only one other place in the world: Mannheim, Germany.
The facts of the 1868 silver discovery may be debatable, but the results are not. It changed lives, reshaped history, and created a town five miles north of Harrisburg called Silver Reef. By 1878, Silver Reef was the biggest town in southern Utah, with a population exceeding 1,500. The miners were largely Irish Catholics who poured into Silver Reef from mining towns in Nevada.
A curious situation developed in Silver Reef. An island of Catholics and some Protestants lived in a sea of Mormon pioneers and their descendants. The two groups got along in spite of significant differences in ideology and lifestyle. Together they made history when the Catholics celebrated high mass in the Mormon tabernacle in nearby St. George. Even the thirty-member Mormon choir participated, having practiced for two weeks from a single copy of music provided by the Catholic priest. On May 25, 1879, a congregation of 3,000 gathered in the tabernacle. Curious, respectful Mormons outnumbered the Catholics more than two to one.
After a few million dollars in silver were dug from the hills, and After a few shootings, lynchings, and hangings, the miners disappeared from Silver Reef as quickly as they had come. Stone walls and wood scaffolding, capsizing into the canyons, are all that remain, except for the bank and the Wells Fargo Express office. Said to be the only one remaining outside California, the Wells Fargo office is restored and is now a museum and gallery.
Comfortably plugged in at Harrisburg for the night, Rusty and I sat on the grass and watched rain clouds gather around the 10,000-foot peaks of the Pine Valley Mountains. Soft piano, as only Floyd Cramer could play it, drifted from the motor home next door. The sun set and took with it the rust from the ridge of sandstone. It was a magnificent sight, just as it was a century ago.
Out there now is the interstate, which at twilight adds a contemporary magnificence of its own. Most people would not call it that, but it’s a sight to be had only in America. Huge trailer trucks that yesterday may have been in a sandstorm in New Mexico or a downpour in Washington now roll through a sunset here in south-central Utah. Their drivers are just now turning on the lights that outline their huge rigs, adding to the visual awe of those mammoths of the American road.
50
Dixie Country
St. George, Utah
The next day, I followed Interstate 15 south a few miles to St. George, where the moving vans from Mayflower and United Van Lines run a constant shuttle service from southern California. This is just one popular destination on the flight-from-California list of the fed-up-and-over-fifty crowd.
The popular magazines that compile annual hit parades of cities of this country always rate St. George among the ten or twenty “best places to retire.” Combine that with economics, and folks in Los Angeles do the logical thing. They sell their grossly appreciated homes there and recreate them here for half the price.
“Dixie Country,” as this area of Utah is called, currently has about 4 percent of the state’s population but 10 percent of it is golf courses. There are no significant employers here, so wages are low. But the newcomers are not looking for jobs. The numbers most important to them are the crime rate, which is low, the current interest rate, and their tee times.
Dixie’s year-round golf courses, spreading around red cliffs and lava-capped ridges, are all within a fifteen-minute drive of each other. And a golfer can play eighteen holes here in the Afternoon, having spent the morning snow skiing at Brian Head or Elk Meadows.
Dixie got its nickname from its early settlers. Mormon pioneers came here in the winter of 1861, as directed by Brigham Young. Leaving their comfortable farms and homes in northern Utah, 309 families colonized this beautiful, albeit dusty, alkali flat. Many chosen for
the task originally hailed from farms in Tennessee and Mississippi. And with good reason. Their mission was to raise cotton. The Civil War, just a few months old, had cut off sources of cotton to the North. Young’s intention was to create a new supply. Their efforts met with only moderate success. With the end of the war and the railroad extending into Utah, cotton again became plentiful. The attempt to grow it here in Dixie ended. But the name stuck.
Brigham Young, the second president of the Mormon Church, was Dixie’s first snowbird, at least the first prominent one. This was his winter retreat from Salt Lake City. His white-picket-fenced house gets top billing on the local tourist tour along with the Mormon temple, which ranks with the Eiffel Tower or the Hollywood sign as a dominant landmark.
Sun-seeking northerners, golf bags in tow, flock here in big numbers to spend the winter. Even more briefly stop for a round of golf and then continue south into Arizona, where winter temperatures are warmer.
Eons before the first pioneers wandered this land, water and wind worked wonders. Alternating between inland seas and Sahara-like deserts, the elements created a great plateau of sands tone and limes tone deposits thousands of feet thick. Over time, these gigantic sheets of rock buckled, folded, and uplifted. Massive sections were exposed to the forces of erosion, which sculpted the land into spectacular shapes and colors.
Utah’s southern half has the most abundant and varied natural beauty of perhaps any state in the union. Until recent road improvements, it was the most remote region of the Lower Forty-eight.
I skirted St. George and headed north on Highway 18. About ten minutes After leaving the interstate, Rusty began racing around in the motor home. She hopped on the couch and looked out the window for a few seconds. Then she hit the floor and disappeared somewhere in the back. A few seconds later, she reappeared and then did it all over again. This burst of energy had some unknown meaning, so I elected not to ignore it. I pulled off a road leading to Snow Canyon State Park.
