BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 30

1904

DANIEL

It was John Garrison's and Hugh Fleming's duet, a pair of lectures at MIT under the banner of "Measuring (and Winning) the West", which lured me first to Utah for railroad work, then to Idaho to work with the Skeens' canal. Fleming spoke about his years near the Snake River, focussing on the difficulties of surveying riparian ground and the equally difficult problems of measuring land bordering and containing hard-to-traverse lava beds. Fleming's work, coming ten years later, shadowed Garrison's 1879 survey, and he and Garrison had worked out an almost vaudevillian act they barnstormed with across the East, jabbing and retorting, polishing one another's efforts and remarks.

The ten years between the two surveyors' appearances in Southeast Idaho saw big changes, Garrison carrying weaponry, half-expecting skirmishes with the Shoshones, Lemhis or Bannocks, and facing a deeper sense of solitude than Fleming, who encountered Desert Claimants and Homestead Act Entrymen, a traffic of a sort not seen by Garrison. Garrison saw only a very few small farms, those on the flats where water was near, Fleming witnessed the birth of agriculture; Garrison occasionally mixed with early cattlemen but Fleming saw them regularly, almost daily. Both spoke of the "forests of wormwood", the aridity, the omnipresence of rocky outcrops, referring to the area as "The Shanghi Plain" at times, a name Garrison believed was applied to the desert area—which ran for well over a hundred miles, east to west and fifty miles wide north to south, between ranges called foothills locally and mountains back home in Vermont—to describe what would get a traveler to cross it: a "shanghai-ing", being drugged and abducted. In truth, for most of the settlers it was exactly that, a case of being shanghaied, not by a perpetrator but their own dreams or desperation.

Though I may have been a pioneer by my Vermont family's standards, likely I would have declined the arduous paths Fleming and Garrison accepted. I was more civilized than they were, not just desirous of others' company but of the safety gained by being amongst them. Since I was younger than the two by a generation, I luckily needn't make that choice. Instead, coming as a second-wave man over two decades later, I achieved a weak facsimile of their experience, still a strong enough sense of it for me, which they had upon witnessing the newness and scope of the Western territory.

When I arrived on the scene in 1904, farmers and herdsmen dotted the countryside and travelers frequently, if randomly, came through, usually heading for somewhere else—the mines toward Lost River, Wood River or Montana or an imagined opportunity in the coastal states. The sagebrush forests that Garrison and Fleming faced remained, to a large degree, a tangle difficult to traverse, the first order of business typically to remove them. Water had yet to come to much of the land, which still exhibited those same lava knolls and rolling valleys that those two surveyors saw. The spring "streams" through the desert, taking snowmelt to basins at lower elevations as they had for millennia, still erupted after hard winters and dissipated just weeks later. What antelope, deer and elk yet roamed were more skittish than they once were, bears appeared infrequently, were almost absent. In a sense, my experience—so I liked to think—was richer than theirs, as I was witnessing one era leaving and another beginning. I was part of the theatre crew changing the set, and while the actors may have been the stars, their efforts the reason for the audience's attendance, the play went on only through my (and others) actions.

Behind the scenes but instrumental to them, I frequently recalled the two surveyors' reflections regarding their wild west days, buffering my own experience with theirs, diluting my misfortunes by comparing them to their greater ones and appreciating my comforts when imagining their deprivations. One can admire, even envy, others and still have no wish to replicate their lives—not their actions, not their appurtenances, and not their acquisitions.

I went to Utah the first time for the Irrigation Congress in Salt Lake City in the early 90s, where the nation's foremost irrigation promoter noted his first sighting of Mormons and Gentiles interacting in a friendly manner, sharing as they did a vision of an arid West transformed. I picked up an engineering job there on the numerous railroad spurs going in, and then worked on the Bear River project as an assistant a few years later. On an infrequent leave from work, I met Glen Bothwell and Robert McConaughy in Salt Lake at a hotel bar, where they convinced me to join them in Southeast Idaho to resurrect the Skeen brothers' stalled project. It had been a decade in the making already, was a waterworks encompassing sizable proportions. I was on the train two days later, questioning the wisdom of my sudden change in positions but, being unmarried and without family, lacking any real rival to reverse my decision. The train stopped frequently, and to break the solitary nature of my trip I took to judging the sorts of people getting on and off.

Just before we hit the Idaho border, the roughness of some boarding passengers gave them away as non-Mormon. Cattlemen's hands, my guess, moving to another job. Then there were those of skins brown but not browned by weather—the Italians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Greeks—no doubt having worked the railroad and heading to projects in Montana. Once into Idaho, the influence of the British Isles and, to a lesser degree, Scandinavia took over, an influence conjoined to exhibit Mormonism's colorations of complexion, demeanor and dress.

At the time there were still plenty Mormons practicing polygamy, despite the proclamation of 1890 decrying it, and though they did not advertise themselves as being so they revealed their identities, so I thought, in their stark and righteous—and to me, repugnant—presence. Thinking themselves chosen by God, hence the rest of us of a lesser status, their arrogance overrode any respect I might have otherwise had for them.

It was in Franklin, at the corner of Idaho, which Mormons thought they had annexed before the state line was officially surveyed, that Lewis McCandless appeared. Though I had not met him, his mien was just a little more distinct, his wear slightly more refined, his posture more confident, than the other passengers, giving his identity away. Bothwell had said I'd be meeting him in Blackfoot for a canal system tour—McCandless was the outgoing Canal President, leaving on good terms it was said, and soon to be Ogden's Postmaster. Already he served as a Stake President of the Church in the Franklin area—he'd been in that position and used his clout in a curious manner a decade earlier, taking the Gentile side of the fight between the Skeens' ditch and the United. His assistance either forced the Skeens' triumph or followed in its wake, maybe both, earning him the status of traitor in the United Mormons' minds but retaining his spiritual authority in his home territory, where many of his laity took his advice to head north and claim land that both ditches, finally freed from their court battle, would soon be irrigating. Having side businesses in Utah along with being on numerous boards, including Utah's insane asylum, all-in-all he was a man of some importance.

Though not an unsociable man, I did not approach McCandless immediately, considering it unnecessary to extend an inevitable meeting that might cover two days, particularly since I might find his company wearing. I easily tired of Mormon discourse, every other thought expressed in their conversation a reference to the Lord, to doctrine, or to events at their personal church house. I had left New England to be shed of righteousness and met its pious reappearance, even in the Mormon form those at home would find unchristian, with distaste.

We traveled another hour, passed Soda Springs—where General Connor had escorted a Mormon offshoot sect to safety some decades prior. About that time McCandless trundled his way back and introduced himself. He took the seat beside me.

Just as I had spotted him, he could tell who I was immediately, he told me, by my appearance. 'Slicker,' he called me, nudging me in jest. He had waited to greet me, he said, to 'measure my decorum'. I did not ask him the outcome of his appraisal.

Had I asked, he may not have answered, for I quickly determined that he had not taken my measure at all, but simply could not go without speaking any longer. He talked, and talked, and talked, and I listened, grateful that his Church references remained minimal.

His patter, matched by the clickety-clack of the narrow gauge rail (an oddity here, sharing the rail bed with another company's wide gauge, making three tracks in all), went on for an hour before he noticed me staring off in to the distance. The Big Southern Butte had taken my attention on this cold spring day of clear blue skies, the such rarely seen in Vermont and which I had first been overwhelmed by but now took to as if it were a welcoming woman. "You can't ignore it, can you?" he said, indicating the volcano spawned Butte, as we pulled a couple miles north of the Portneuf Gap—stage heists here, he said, were once so frequent that it was called Robber's Roost.

The Butte was visible for forty miles or more, he informed me, depending on the weather. His Sunday sermonizing came through as he added "like most prominent features in a man's life it gets relegated to the common." He inserted a grave pause. "Since it's always there, since it never moves, since it isn't a threat, is reliable, and always available, it gets ignored." He paused again, shifted in his seat. "Still, even in the back of one's mind it presents a sort of constant, even ominous authority," he said, his attention soaring off as if he were contemplating other things. He turned toward me. "Quiet and hidden, but ready." He winked.

McCandless regaled me with remembrances, and they were many. The passing territory reminded him of his horse-drawn freighter trips through Malad, into Fort Hall and then far north, to the Lemhi mission. Sometimes he laughed, in the way time allows an ordeal to turn into a humorous anecdote. He told about his first trip with another young man named Leavitt, how they had to unload half their load at every hill before their young, untrained oxen would challenge the inclines.

We neared Pocatello, a town a decade old and booming due to the Indians ceding a third of their land—a land rush had taken place just three years before when the area was put up for claim. The Big Southern was now in full majestic view, and McCandless's demeanor took on reverence. "Two and a half thousand feet above the plain," he remarked. Twisting his head to the right, directing my attention to the shorter cones to the Butte's northeast, he added, "The Twin Buttes are just a third of that, significant elsewhere, hardly worth mentioning aside the Big Southern."

He guided my gaze southward with an outstretched arm, pointed to a spot he clearly knew but which I had to imagine. "About halfway to the Butte," he said, "Fort Hall, by the river. Gone now, flood took it away. Wyeth chose well, though, the Butte was his beacon, he knew it would be the emigrants' beacon, too. The Butte made his trading post easy to find, being on a direct line toward it." McCandless had been to Wyeth's fort, after it became the Hudson's Bay's, multiple times, his first time with Leavitt.

Richard Grant, who Hudson's Bay let man the post despite them having abandoned it years before, had given McCandless and Leavitt a history lesson, which included the first Methodist Church service and the Presbyterian presence in Wyeth's party. "He wanted us two Mormon boys to know what religion held the area," McCandless confided. He paused. "Methodists and Presbyterians may have beat us here, but we Mormons won the race." He winked conspiratorially.

Past Pocatello we stopped to pick up three Indians along the tracks. McCandless explained that the railroad had to stop anytime there were natives wanting on or off, that being part of the agreement for allowing the railroad through the Reservation. "Makes for some odd moments," he laughed without explaining. While we waited for the train to stop and start again, McCandless noted another feature on the horizon, a small hill that rose from the plain he called Ross Butte. He had used the ferry there, Meek's, located just north of it on the Snake River, as the rear guard for Brigham Young's hundred and fifty member entourage up to Fort Lemhi—"I was made fun of a good amount for being on the hind end of things," he said, "But I knew rear guard was an important position."

"Brigham was disappointed upon hitting the Lemhi," McCandless told me. "He told the brethren there they should have stopped at the confluence of the Blackfoot and Snake. The weather and soil would have been more agreeable." The spot also would have been a better outpost in the expected war with the U.S.—which was sidetracked by the Union's larger battle with the South.

When we reached Blackfoot just a few minutes later, I left my belongings at the Cottage Hotel, just south of the depot. McCandless's own load was minimal as he planned to return the next day to Ogden. Lewis—we were on first name basis now—had two horses saddled up for the ride out to the canal works. "This bay will be yours, she will treat you right," he said, handing me the reins. The mare would prove his words true.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston