“Well . . . Yessir, I guess you could say that.”
“Somebody’s going to burn for the way we treat the Chinese. They’re kind and gentle people for the most part, and we treat them like they’re nothing. They used to buy passage back to China so that when they died they could be shipped home and buried with their kinfolks. Then we passed a law against that. And Blankenship would stuff his mother if it’d bring him a dollar. Speaking of which.” He handed me my pay in a little brown envelope.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Speaking of your pay, that is. Have a seat.”
I sat in a rocking chair facing him, and looked around. There was a bunch of books and magazines stacked neat into one set of shelves. There was some big pictures on the wall opposite the settee. One of Abraham Lincoln which I knew wouldn’t make Mr. Copeland happy, and one of somebody I didn’t know. It seemed like he knew a lot about things, and maybe that’s why he didn’t spend so much time hanging around the saddle shop or other places.
“I understand you had a good trip,” he said.
“Yessir.”
“Found a cliff dwelling?”
“Yessir.”
“These two pots here came out of a cliff dwelling that my brother and I came upon last winter.”
“There was some pots in the one we found, too.”
“That’s what Zack said.” He was sitting there with his feet up, his hands crossed in his lap and he looked like he won’t in no hurry at all which is not the way he is when he’s working—where he’s always in a hurry. I thought about my own daddy, what he might have been like.
“Tell me about it—the ruin,” he said.
“Well, once we got in through this hole, it opened up and there was six or eight little rooms sort of built there. And this was high up on the cliff. It had been buried by a slide. You had to bend down to get in a room, but it looked like inside that nothing had been bothered much except some of the walls had caved in so that most of the rooms had a lot of rocks and stuff on the floor. Most of the rooms had ceilings about five feet high.”
He leaned up forward like he was real interested. “You can imagine the place you came upon,” he said, “uncovered, and about ten times bigger—hell, twenty times bigger. . .”
“You’ve seen one that big?”
“The first one we found—Eagle City.”
“How old are they?”
“Can’t say for sure. We cut down a very old piñon tree that had grown in the middle of one of their footpaths—had over three hundred rings in it, and the footpath was worn considerable, meaning the path was used a long time. And we don’t know how much time passed after the path was last used before the tree started growing.”
He told me about coming upon the first dwelling he saw when he was up in the mesa hunting cattle. He put in all about snowflakes and the setting sun and all this. He hadn’t been able to find nobody that is much interested in all of it, and he needed help to go back in there for major excavations. He wanted to know if I’d go back, exploring with him, probably in less than two weeks. I said I would, for sure, and he said all I’d have to do is get Mr. Copeland to say okay.
Somewhere in there I mentioned that we’d seen the ferry operator and his son up north of the mesa. Markham Thorpe and Hiram.
“He’s interested in the relics, too,” said Mr. Merriwether. “To prove that the Indians are a lost tribe of Israel. The Mormons are out to find relics that connect the Indians to Israel or to Jesus. They believe Indians came straight from Old Testament land and Jesus visited America during the three days after he arose from the dead.”
“What?” That seemed strange. “And didn’t Bishop Thorpe used to have more than one wife?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Is Hiram’s mother still around? Hiram seemed right normal.”
“That would be Harmony Beasley. She changed her name back. They all say they’re following the law now. Harmony is a very fine woman. She and her sister came out here some years back in a traveling band, family band, and settled just north of Mumford Rock. Then Thorpe married Harmony and she and her sister had a falling out about it. They’d been very close, and very religious—Presbyterians, I think. They did a lot of religious music, but they’d break out into other stuff, too. The Indians around here used to love to hear them play. The Beasley Family Band. They all moved out and left Harmony behind. She’s running that little store north of the ferry. You’ve been by there. She seems to be very happy. Beautiful woman. I don’t have any trouble with most of their ways,” he said. “It’s just all . . . well, it’s a long story. And the worst of it was Mountain Meadows.”
I’d heard about that for as long as I could remember. “What was that, anyway? I can’t get it straight.”
“Back in the thirties and forties, the Mormons were run out of a couple of eastern states, and their leader, Joseph Smith, was assassinated, killed. So they split up into several groups and the biggest group settled in Utah, set up a kingdom, more or less, and decided that San Diego would be their seaport.”
I wondered if my kinfolks had been Mormons. I was always trying to remember about my family. They was just vague shapes, kind of.
“All this was fine, but you see, the problem was that the Mormons wouldn’t follow United States laws, just Mormon laws, and it got so bad with them breaking U.S. law and not punishing their people that President Buchanan sent twenty-five hundred troops to replace Brigham Young as governor with a fellow named Cummings. This was back in fifty-seven. Well, the Mormons got fired up and declared war. But they were in close with the Indians—had to be, they figured—and they still are, you see.
“In the meantime there was a wagon train from Arkansas on the way to Utah. What the people on this wagon train didn’t realize was that the Mormons had decided that if any wagon train that wasn’t Mormon came through Utah, then they would refuse to trade with it—no water, no grain, no bread, no supplies of any kind. So when the wagon train—it was the Chandler Train—started down the length of Utah, no Mormon would give them water or sell them anything. Nothing. A good deal of tension developed.”
“How’d you find out about all this?”
“My father was obsessed with it. He was in the army and visited the site in fifty-nine, two years after it happened. That’s how I know so much about it. I was about four years old at the time, and I vaguely remember him coming home and telling about it all.” He reached over for the little glass of plain tea—or whiskey—he was drinking from. Then I figured he might be a little tight and that’s why he was talking so much.
“How old are you?” he said.
“I’m about fifteen, sixteen.”
“Get you a number and stick with it. Say you were born in seventy-five. You probably were. You got a date?”
“Nosir.”
“What’s your favorite month?”
“I don’t know. April?”
“Make it April fifteenth, 1875. You are sixteen years old. So you were about two when Boyle, Calvin Boyle, met the firing squad because of it all. Twenty years between the doing and the trying one man.
“Anyway, back to fifty-seven. Some of the Mormons started in preaching sermons, hot, fiery sermons, advocating blood atonement and such and such, and so by the time the wagon train got to Mountain Meadows, the Mormon leaders had told the Indians, mostly Paiutes, to wipe them out. Gave them the go-ahead.
“The people in the wagon train were preparing for a week of rest at Mountain Meadows when the Indians attacked on a Monday morning, I think it was, and killed six or eight of the immigrants, wounded some others, but the immigrants somehow managed to circle up their wagons and hold them off. For all of that day and two more days. Inside those circled wagons they buried the dead, dug a trench for the wounded, women, and children. Conditions were terrible.”
He took his feet off the table and started stuffing a pipe. “My father used to tell me about it. He told it over and over. He’d say, ‘Imagine you were a child in that wagon tr
ain.’ I can tell it to you the way he told me: ‘Imagine you’re there. You’re four years old. You are watching your mother and father at war—for three long days and nights in a little grassy valley, inside a little fort of wagons, holding Indians at bay. You see people dying. You attend makeshift funerals. Your parents are stricken with the terror and the horror happening to them and you. You knew all the people who are now dead. You hide in a trench with your mother and the dying.
“‘On the fourth day, the Indians disappear. There is a feeling of astonishment, relief, apprehension.
“‘Across the meadow come three Mormons on horses, bearing white flags. Your people let them into the corral of wagons. Their spokesman brings wonderful, unbelievable news—the Indians have withdrawn, and there are fifty Mormon men to escort all of you back to Cedar City, thirty-five miles away. Back to safety.
“‘There is one catch, say the Mormons. All weapons and wounded must be put in wagons, which will be followed by the women and children walking, and then some ways back, in a group—the men. These precautions are in case the Indians decide to return. They will see that their enemy has been “captured.” They will be fooled, says the spokesman.
“‘So the march begins. The march of deliverance. There is great sorrow among your people about the ten or so deaths, but there is a great sense of relief, of salvation.
“‘Across the meadow come fifty armed Mormons to escort you back to Cedar City. They walk beside your father and the other men—back behind you. You are walking with your mother, your sister, your brother, and all the other women and children up behind the wagons that hold the wounded and the weapons. The entire group walks about a mile. Suddenly someone shouts, Halt. Do your duty. A volley of loud, percussive rifle shots from behind you. You look back. The Mormons are standing with rifles to their shoulders—some bringing the rifles down—some shooting again, scattered shooting. Your father and all but two of his friends are on the ground, dead or dying. More shots. The two left standing now fall. Scattered shots finish those who aren’t dead. The Mormon men sit down, and from the bushes rush a horde of shouting Indians, streaked in purple war paint, carrying rifles and hatchets. Two of them are running straight at you. Some have stopped and are aiming and shooting into your group of women and children. Blood spatters onto your clothes. Bright red, full of life. Your mother makes no sound. You are knocked down by an elbow and a knee. You cover your head with your arms. The screams—high, fierce pitches. The groans, deep and weak. You listen with closed eyes.
“‘You look around. You do not see your mother. You stand. The clothes your sister was wearing are on a shape, a form on the ground, still and bloody. You start to run back to your father. Maybe he is alive. Your world is vanishing. A Mormon grabs you, holds you, kicking, and takes you to a wagon.
“‘A decision had been made, see, to let you live. You are one of the lucky ones. The Mormons will announce to the world that they saved you and sixteen other small children from the Indians. It is believed that you are too young to remember and tell what happened. But you remember. You remember it all, and one day you will tell. But first, they take you—’”
One of the Mexicans came to the door and said he needed Mr. Merriwether at the windmill. I was in a sort of trance.
“Walk with me outside,” he said.
“What happened to the children?” I said. We was walking out toward the windmill.
“They were adopted by Mormons. A few years later government officials came for them and returned them to Arkansas. Listen to this: the Mormons billed the U.S. government for their upkeep.”
“Really?”
“That’s right. Then the Civil War came along and all attention was diverted. The one man, Calvin Boyle, was finally set up as scapegoat in 1877 and shot at the site of the massacre—the one I told you about—set on the foot of his coffin and shot so that he fell back in it, the only one ever officially implicated.
“But in the meantime several of them wrote sworn statements about what happened. Mormons, that is.”
We got to the windmill and he climbed up and went to work on it. I wondered what I would’ve done if I’d been back there with them Mormons.
With the influx of entrepreneurs from other parts of our great Nation came the influx of new ideas. Mortuary Science from Denver, Anthropology and Archaeology from eastern universities, Electricity from the Northeast, new Railroads crisscrossing the western domain, newfound respect for the Cultures of American Indians, who are after all, part of the Human Experiment.
Newspapers of the period were reporting the opening of the West to Progress . . .
The Mumford Rock Weekly
AUGUST 20, 1891
MUMFORD ROCK—Several interested readers have visited the Weekly’s office in the last week or so to report incidents of corpse explosions. Mr. Douglass Rankin, newly arrived from Flagstaff, Arizona, reports that his uncle John exploded in Flagstaff on July 5th, 1888. Rankin reports that his kinsman had been shipped on ice by rail from Santa Fe, removed from ice and placed in a coffin. After a wake, the coffin was closed and transported by wagon to the Mount Easter Cemetery during the morning of July 5th, an unusually hot day. At approximately 2:00 P.M. during the graveside service his uncle John exploded, reports Mr. Rankin. A new coffin was built on the premises from a wagon bed.
Mrs. Watkins Batharlomew reports that her husband, Mr. Watkins Batharlomew, exploded in Idaho during the summer of 1885. Mr. Batharlomew had requested to be allowed to lie in state on the top of the Batharlomew home, a spot on a flat portion of the roof where he often sat to read the Bible. Because Mr. Batharlomew had unfortunately drowned in a tank near his home and was somewhat disfigured it was decided that he would lie in state in a closed casket. Mr. Batharlomew exploded at noon of his second day in state on the roof. Mrs. Batharlomew reported that it was planned that he be taken down at 2:00 P.M. Mr. Batharlomew was recoffined and buried in the family graveyard.
Other incidents may be reported to the Mumford Rock Weekly office on Fourth Street, downtown Mumford Rock.
THE FERRY
And, finally, who can say what passions forge the links that bind us in ever-intricate ways? . . .
On Monday, our first day on the trail, we will traverse the famous Thorpe’s Ferry, where Bishop Thorpe proposed marriage to the damsel from North Carolina, Star Copeland. What lurid passions lurked in the loins of the honorable Mormon bishop? (Harken! Do we sense a shift to the bawdy? Shame, oh, shame—but yet some of the wildness, the “badness” of our fair west lingers, does it not? We will hasten to extinguish it.) What longings were brought from the green hills of North Carolina by fair maiden Star? Ah, but the plot thickens.
The ferry crossing itself lies in a river bend and has been in place since the earliest days of inhabitation of these lands by civilized peoples.
We will stop for a rest at Thorpe’s Ferry (now Sullivan’s Ferry—but old habits die hard) and meet the present owner (Mr. Richard Sullivan, oddly enough!) and pass a brief time inspecting the mechanisms of ferry operation. We will point out the spot on the western bank where said proposal was made. We will then proceed along the trail to our first night of song and festivities at an overnight camp . . .
STAR
Here is how it happened: Wednesday of last week Uncle P.J. asked if I’d like to go with him up to Beacon City to deliver saddles. Aunt Ann and Grandma Copeland were canning. I’d heard that the wagon drive to Beacon City is quite lovely and I wanted to see where the Mormons lived, so I said yes.
I was spending the mornings at the ranch last week and so a little after dinner, Uncle P.J. came by for me. Libby had just walked out to tell me, among other things, that the young Englishman would need somebody to show him around the ranch and perhaps I’d like to do it. I’d been introduced to Mr. Collier but had had no time to talk with him. He is here at the ranch in order to go with Mr. Merriwether on an expedition onto Mesa Largo. I momentarily regretted that I’d agreed to go along with Uncle P.J. to Beacon City. I
’ve never met an Englishman before Andrew Collier, or even seen one. In fact, the Chinamen who work on the roads and in the mines and the Germans and Dutch in town with the silver mines are the only foreigners I’ve ever seen.
When Uncle P.J. arrived to pick me up, I lingered as long as I might in case Mr. Collier might approach us, but he remained out of sight.
And so we were off to Beacon City.
Just before the ferry crossing was a little house with a MEALS sign on a porch post.
“One of Thorpe’s wives runs that place,” said Uncle P.J., “and another one runs a little trading post on the other side of the river.”
“I thought that was against the law—more than one wife.”
“It is, and they all say they ain’t married no more—except to just one, or none.”
When we got to the ferry crossing, the ferry itself was on the far side of the river unloading chickens and goats, and there was a surrey waiting on the near side. When the ferry reached our side I observed that the owner, Bishop Thorpe, was an imposing sort, wearing a high black hat, and dressed in dusty black clothes, except for a white shirt buttoned tightly around his neck. He looked to be older than I imagined he would be, yet very fit and capable, and he also seemed to be a man who was no stranger to anger—to being angry. His hair down around his ears and neck seemed unnaturally black and I wondered if he used soot on it, but I studied it carefully once I got close to him and reckoned that he didn’t. His eyebrows were bushy and the eyes underneath were very young and, I might even dare to say, alluring.
Once the ferry, an almost square boat, reached our side of the river, we rumbled onto it. In one corner of the open deck a table was nailed to the flooring. Nailed to the top of the table was a small wooden box with a glass top. Inside were two books, side by side. One was the Bible and the other was the Book of Mormon.
After we launched, Uncle P.J. was conducting friendly conversation with Bishop Thorpe when it struck me that perhaps “Mormon” was a person, like Matthew, as in the Book of Matthew, so at the first lull in the conversation, I asked Mr. Thorpe if Mormon was a person.
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