Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  “Five! Four! Three!…”

  Dynamite has been strategically placed up and down the sides of the Sands, along It’s burnt-red-and-white exterior, and inside the main support beams. The old neon cursive—The Sands—has but a few seconds left. An army of video cameras is aimed at the hotel. For Vegas residents, these executions are wearing thin. The noise, the dust, the muscle-popping din of the City on Steroids trying to remake itself at all hours is too much. People may be trying to sleep in Mariners Cove, but there is little they can do, because The Strip, by design, is outside the city limits. And by It’s very nature, it has to shoot It’s old and infirm, and constantly cannibalize the past to stay alive. They sutured New York, New York, ancient Egypt, Caesar’s Rome, and medieval Europe to a hardtack of clay, and all around them, in the cloisters where people go to sleep at 10 P.M., and school and work in the morning, they are creating the Los Angeles of Blade Runner. The lament most often heard from old-timers in Vegas is this: the streets were safer when the Mob ran the town.

  “Two! One! Bring it down, baby!”

  A symmetrical blast. Smoke plumes on the side. The Sands lets out a whimper and crumbles in a wheeze. The crowd roars. Yes-s-s! A ripple of high fives. Awesome! A cloud of white dust rises and disappears into the darkness, spreading to Harbour Vista and The Lakes and beyond to ground not yet turned to bluegrass because the water has yet to arrive. Back at the Mirage, I’m dropping quarters into a slot. The lights atop the machine go off. A woman comes around and peels off three hundred-dollar bills. I’m delirious. You can get something for nothing, and Venice can rise in a land without water. Put a $2-billion straw in the Colorado and Vegas will respond like a man at the all-you-can-eat buffet; you consume until you’re sick. The dismembered corpse of the Sands is visible across the street: a thirty-foot pile of rubble. Clean it up and bring in the canals. From The Strip, the lights of the tallest building west of the Mississippi, the Stratosphere, are straining for attention. It is one of the newest skyscrapers in America, 1,149 feet above the desert floor, but already it seems doomed. Nobody goes there, perhaps because it is in the old funky Western part of town, the place that gave birth to Block 16 and the big neon cowboy and the Golden Nugget. Vegas started as a cowboy fantasy retreat. You roll into town, lose a week’s pay, get drunk, get laid, and get out with a few stories to tell the boys back at the ranch. Now, It’s the American Vatican for Vice, requiring grand ritual and show for pilgrims dressed like six-year-olds. So how long does the Stratosphere have until it too will be shot in the darkness before dawn?

  FROM THE Kelso Dunes, I can see much better. This is the desert without illusion. Or I should say, the desert with clarity, which brings with it It’s own illusions. Dry air, following a wind, late in the day—the windows are clean. Done with Vegas, I wanted to make contact with the Mojave. So I went west, past Stateline, into California and then took a left at a 134-foot-high thermometer outside Bun Boy in the town of Baker. From there, south into the Mojave National Preserve, the world grew silent and open. I turned off the radio, because it seemed a trivial distraction. Using an old BLM map, I found a washboard road and followed it to the Kelso Dunes. I went as far as I could go. Then I walked across dry grass and sand, and hiked up the dunes, seven hundred feet to the top. With each step, my feet sank, as if I were walking through fresh snow, and with each step, a little bit of Vegas excess, of free drinks and three-thousand-calorie buffets, was forced out of me. The winds constantly rearranged the sand, sifting and cleaning it.

  At the top, I watched the evening light bring to life the highest flanks of the vertical desert; in some places, the exposed layers formed a near-complete record of Earth’s past, all the melting and molding, the spill of iron and hardening of granite, the earthquake cracks and sun-colored sides. Then it was gone, and there was a twilight of mystery and strange sounds, the Mojave freaks coming out at night. In the darkness, I thought of Twain’s remarks at the end of his adventure in Nevada. He went bust in the mines, gagged on the water—“like drinking lye, bitter and in every way execrable”—laughed at his own greed, got drunk and silly with people he had nearly killed a few days earlier, and then cozied up to the desert just before he left. Sitting around a campfire at night, naked to the outdoors, was for Twain, “the very summit and culmination of earthly luxury.”

  The purity of night in the Mojave Preserve is marred only by the throbbing light well off to the east—the pulse of Vegas, growing by the hour. Las Vegas needs more water not just to stay alive but to preserve It’s life-sustaining illusion. They seek it for the same reason Ponce de Leon went after the Fountain of Youth in Florida. The city will likely gets It’s water, and then will continue to spread and fatten for another twenty years, maybe even fifty, but then Vegas will consume itself. It will need to be bailed out by the federal government and protected by the National Guard. Give it another hundred years and it may well join Crackerjack, Skidoo, Calico, and other ghost towns of the Mojave. Another five hundred years and some archaeologists will be puzzling over the site of the Sands, a ruin no less intriguing than Mesa Verde.

  Abbey’s cancer is already happening. And, in a sign that the end may truly be near, the casino magnate Steve Wynn has started to warn that something terribly wrong is happening in the fantasy city he helped to create. He says it is time to “slow down and think about what we’re doing.” These words—slow down, think—usually get checked at the Vegas airport. At Lake Mead, just a few miles from where the city draws It’s water, there are fish with twisted spines and mutated genes. The males have female egg protein in their blood plasma, making them unable to reproduce. If human embryos followed a similiar pattern, extinction could be around the corner. Biologists theorize that the fish took in too much of the liquid waste of Las Vegas. In all their plumbing and engineering, the water czars made one monumental error. As it turns out, the people of this most daring of American cities draw their drinking water just six miles from the same spot where they dump their waste, a stream of barely treated effluents that are particularly heavy with pesticides from hotels trying to make sure that not a single mosquito visits the Strip. The Paiutes never drank from the same place where they buried their poisons. Nor did the Mormons. But of course, they never thought you could put a million and a half people in the middle of an unwatered desert.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Empire of Clean

  St. George, Utah

  This was a fairyland to us, for all intents and purposes—a land of enchantment and awful mystery.

  —Mark Twain.

  Roughing It

  In the Beehive State of Utah, nearly every town, church, and family of any standing keeps a record, a daily diary of the Mormon Dream. Typically, it is a ledger of life on two levels—one long on struggle and triumph, the story of the creation of Zion in the American West, the other more spiritual but no less detailed. They know in Orderville exactly who was hungry in 1912 and who committed adultery in 1956, but they also know whether somebody’s ancestor from the fifteenth century has been given a valid passport to eternal life. Every wagon train drama, every horrific entry from the epic, killing mistake of the handcart migration, every basketball championship over the Italian kids in Carbon County, is written down, somewhere. No state has more keepers of history, or better archives, honeycombed in climate-controlled vaults, than Utah.

  Some may see this as vanity, the written ornaments for what was to have been a great sovereign nation, the divinely inspired dictatorship of Deseret, taking up nearly a third of the West. Buffing for posterity, with perhaps only a slight bit more self-indulgence than other people, is certainly part of it. But the greater purpose transcends group chauvinism. For most of these histories will serve ultimately as a guide to the guest list of the hereafter. Life deeds count. Having good descendants is even better. Postmortem sealing in the Temple has brought more dead people into the circle of the eternally redeemed than living. Because there is so much at stake, Mormons have made a workaday craftsmanship of keepin
g the past alive. There is a record, the Saints like to say, of everything.

  But while this system may work fine for heaven, it could still prompt a crisis in this world. Mormonism, the onetime cult, the founding idea of a radical state, is now the fastest-growing religion in America. The church sends out forty thousand missionaries a year. Utah, host of the 2002 Winter Olympics, has stepped onto the world stage. Come see what we have created in the Great Basin, they say with pride. Look at the industry, the cities, the model communities. Utah is American life lite, without cynicism or corruption, producing more babies per capita and healthier adults than any other state. Smoke-free and nonalcoholic were part of the Mormon canon long before they became the stuff of presidential initiatives. The Empire of Clean presents itself as the polar opposite of the other desert dynasty, Las Vegas. This is never more clear than at the Utah/Nevada border at Wendover, where half the town is given over to neon smiles, gambling warehouses, and homes with curtains shut for midday sleepers, and the other half is buzzing with industry and commerce the old-fashioned way, the tallest building in town being the Latter Day Saints’ church. The two town councils, sharing the only road through town, despise each other so much they often refuse to meet.

  What keeps so many Saints whistling through the years is a group narrative that goes like this: persecuted religion flees to the West, establishes a sanctuary in the desert, blooms and prospers to become the envy of the world. All true, in a broad sense. But what is typically forgotten is the stories about how Mormonism, the most homegrown of American religions, was for a long time at odds with the most basic of American ideals. So for all the surface cheer and the overt displays of history, no state may be more afraid of It’s past than Utah.

  Throughout the West, other communities have come to terms with things their Rotary clubs may never discuss. Pancho Villas guerrilla war in 1916—the last invasion of the United States—and the illegal expedition by General Pershing to try to capture him in Mexico, keep dozens of people on payrolls from El Paso to Tombstone. The mass murders of striking miners by Pinkerton mercenaries under cover of martial law is museum, trinket, and tour fodder in Idaho’s Silver Valley. And San Francisco long ago turned much of It’s waterfront over to a theme built around syphilitic old salts, profiteering gold-rush merchants, and whores with soft hearts—the Barbary Coast, possibly the most unhealthy time ever to live in the City by the Bay. Utah is going in the opposite direction, cleaning out the unwanted parts of It’s history. In Temple Square, octogenarian leaders of the church worry that a letter or note may still turn up, making Brigham Young look more like Charles Manson than Charlton Heston. And above town, the old abandoned fort on a bench overlooking Salt Lake, a favorite spot for sunset strolls, remains as a squat, intractable reminder of a war that very few Americans have ever heard of, the war against the man whose statue is everywhere in this state, the leader of the only true American theocracy ever to get beyond the fledgling state. In a clear-eyed view of the West, the Mormons are one of the main reasons why this part of the world is so full of wonder, and shame.

  THE Mountain Meadows had yet to green up on the spring day when I went up to Dan Sill Hill to look out over the most blood-soaked piece of ground in Utah. The valley is farmed for hay, grazed by cattle and horses during certain months, and is Well-watered during the runoff, when snow from the northern reaches of Dixie National Forest joins up with springs to bring life to the lower elevations. A few shade trees and windbreaks have been planted. Otherwise, it is bare and empty. The people in St. George, less than an hour to the south, are friendly to a fault about most anything a traveler needs; they feed on questions from the curious. The climate in Utah’s Dixie, as they call the area around St. George in the southwest corner of the state, is sweet and infectious. It is only when you start to ask about Mountain Meadows that people treat you like a stranger.

  “Go north, I guess,” a church guide at Brigham Young’s winter home told me.

  “There’s nothing up there,” another said.

  And quite likely, some could call what I saw up on Dan Sill Hill nothing. You turn off on a little side road—cough and you miss the sign—wind your way to the vista, and then get on with the task of deciphering the most cryptic historical marker in the West. A new slab of Vermont granite is mounted on the site. No stone commemoration was more fought-over. Not even at Little Bighorn—where the name of the site itself has changed, and the official explanation of what happened has gone back and forth with the shifting sentiments toward Custer and Crazy Horse—has there been so much Sturm und Drang over what to say about a deed long gone. At least at Little Bighorn, early on, there was postmortem evidence that something grave and maybe even historic had taken place. At Mountain Meadows, the valley held all the secrets. Or as Juanita Brooks, a good Mormon from St. George who spent more than fifty years trying to find the truth of what happened below, has said, the valley “is so sterile and barren that it would actually seem to bear the curse of God upon it.” Now there is this:

  IN MEMORIAM

  IN THE VALLEY BELOW

  BETWEEN SEPTEMBER 7 AND II, 1857

  A COMPANY OF MORE THAN 120 ARKANSAS EMIGRANTS

  LED BY CAPT. JOHN BAKER AND CAPT. ALEXANDER FANCHER

  WAS ATTACKED WHILE EN ROUTE TO CALIFORNIA.

  THIS EVENT IS KNOWN IN HISTORY AS THE

  MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE.

  Who were the attackers? And why did they attack? How did the victims die? What did they die for? Was it war, robbery, an E. colt virus planted in the food? The most pedestrian of roadside historical markers in Utah is crammed with numbing detail about a simple crossing of a river, a first planting of a peach orchard, a pioneer recalled. Throughout the West, there are national monuments, fully staffed museums, whole symposiums built around the many massacres. The Whitman Massacre of missionaries at Walla Walla, the Meeker Massacre of Ute Indians, and the Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne, to name just a few. But here, site of what was the worst carnage ever inflicted on a single band of overland emigrants in the entire nineteenth century expansion of the West, the stone has nothing to satisfy these questions. Next to the one declaratory paragraph is a list of the dead. At the top, by alphabet, is William Allen Aiden, age nineteen—the young man who was shot off his horse as he rode into a place where he thought he would be protected. And there is William Cameron, his wife, Martha, and seven of their children. Another family, Jesse and Mary Dunlap, and their seven children. A second family of Dunlaps, Lorenzo and Nancy, the entire clan killed, down to the four young girls, Mary Ann, thirteen, Talitha Emaline, eleven, Nancy, nine, and America Jane, age seven.

  They died, these “Arkansas Emigrants,” in a round of executions that took less than five minutes, by the written accounts of several participants. Believing that they were walking into the hands of rescuers in the midst of hostile Paiute country, the emigrants had disarmed themselves and formed a single file away from their wagons. And then the rescuers, followers of Brigham Young, more than fifty white men, many of them elders and bishops, and Indians under their control, turned around and opened fire. Most of the emigrants were shot in the head, from point-blank range. Some were hacked to death, throats cut. The meadows were full of wailing, screeching, horror. Those too sick or feeble to walk were found trembling inside the wagons; they were shot in the face or chest. The bodies were hastily buried, many later dug up by wolves. A few of the smallest, most helpless children were spared; no one else was let out of the valley alive. The toddlers were hurried away, adoptions into the night, to join broods of polygamous families, too young to be witnesses. But some from those family lines, descendants of both the keepers of the secret and the victims, did not forget. Or their hearts would not allow them to.

  IT WAS a subversive territory, a rebel stronghold before there ever was rebellion in the South. Though settled by Americans, the State of Deseret was for a long time a place where the Constitution of the United States meant little. Brigham Young had barely crossed through a fores
ted canyon of the Wasatch range in 1847, pronouncing “This is the place,” in the Great Salt Lake Valley, when he made clear his vision of the Empire. The boundary lines went well into Idaho and part of Oregon to the north, to the Mexican border in the south, California in the west, with a seaport near San Diego. Find me a place, Young had said, that nobody else wants. The Great Basin, too high and curved for any water to drain the salt and mineral deposits out of it, was such a place, he reasoned. The chalky bottom of an old rock tub, bigger than Texas, would be home. Paiutes and Utes, Shoshone and Navajo lived at the edges, but had no armies to speak of. Three hundred years after Coronado had come through, the Spanish were long gone, leaving lyrical names on sierras and at river junctions. The mountain men had trapped it and mapped it but could never see making homes in it. The Mexicans, taking over after their republic was established in 1821, issued broad decrees of citizenship, and were very generous with land grants, but still could not get people to build cities in the brown acreage where the largest body of water was saltier than the ocean itself.