BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 32

DANIEL

My first day in Blackfoot, after breakfasting with Lewis and suffering through his prayer entreating Joseph Smith and then seeing him off on the train, first entailed a short ride through town. I had intended to immediately make my way to the canal system, but once I heard what I heard I dismounted to stroll down the street. My ears picked up sounds as unique and cacophonous as those assaulting a birdwatcher in the jungle. German came from one blacksmith's, Finnish from another's, Welsh emerged at the bank door. Canadian, Scots, Austrian, Russian, Japanese, Swiss—blending and clashing, a hash comprised of multiple languages sprayed from the boardwalk and the various establishments lining it.

The mud of early spring that I would later find omnipresent was absent this dry, open-snow year, and was already giving way to dust. I lingered, a tourist of sort—my last moment in such a role—until considering the spectacle I became a spectacle myself. Abruptly aware I was being perceived a slackard, I left the language hodgepodge—a feature that would continue for years as claimants moved in on both the Skeen Canal and the Reservation Canal on the other side of the river. The linguistic free-for-all would disappear and re-form again and again in slightly different configurations, though never in such a concentrated, alarming (to me) fashion.

I'd have preferred to take the road southwest which followed the river, a well-traveled trail used by cattlemen and later by the settlers who would usurp them. It was in places somewhat protected from a rising wind. But I knew I best instead head out to the canal, get an acquaintance with the work, so I took the bridge out west of town and rode west to the ditch out by Moreland—also named Bryan, I was told, after the Populist presidential candidate, but called Keever before that. The Mormons were trying to put their stamp on the land, rewriting history, by providing their own names—a decade earlier they had tried to rename Tilden "Grover" after their Bishop there. I forwent the two upper flumes where the United and Skeen canals crossed, for having lingered in Blackfoot I needed to make better time to reach the Big Fill by dusk.

In just a bit more than an hour I reached the third and last crossing flume, near the United's First Terminus—never reaching their second, where our Big Fill would be. There our ditch would fork into the elevated Highline westward and the lower altitude Lowline southward—some of the work was already underway. At the First Terminus, competing crews had witnessed the separating paths where Mormons and Gentiles finally declared a truce, forced to that position by court order and dire financial straits.

On the way to that spot I had passed small homesteads on the south side of the canal, their numbers sporadic and dwindling the further I rode, while on the north side I could see some settlers had tried scratching out a dry farm living. Water was the difference that spoke of the disparity in wealth between the two, though wealth might be overstating the status of even those who'd done well—a shack as opposed to a makeshift tent or lean-to made of brush and cedar.

Not far down from that last siphon, the Skeen canal cut between two low hills, and less than a mile downstream from there, the first of three system reservoirs appeared. The idea—maybe inspired by the 1894 flood when seventy thousand cubic feet of water, double a high year flow, went through Idaho Falls—was to hold winter water and its spring runoff in the basins for summer use, but the guiding factor here might have been that only the left bank needed to be immediately constructed, freeing work downstream. This first reservoir, the Burrell Basin, was a five thousand acre bowl for water, though it wasn't now anywhere near full.

I saw civilization's beginnings but nature was still far ahead of it, artemisia and white sage plus a cedar every once in awhile the only visible marks—save the canal and some patches of dirty snow on the lee sides of every knoll. I assessed the roll of the land and imagined the laterals cutting across it, crops soon to cover the barrenness. The west bank land would be unirrigated for awhile, despite its promising acreage, in order to take the straightest and quickest route to meet the deadline to finish.

About four miles further on, I spotted activity on the canal. A man jumped on a horse and rode toward me swiftly—I eased my hand close to my holster, not too concerned but ready should I need be.

His manner looked askew, as if he were riding side saddle. When he neared I saw the reason. He was missing one leg. He pulled up before me, said with a Scandinavian accent, "Hang on yust a minute, got a boom coming."

It was but a few seconds before that "boom" did come from the place in the canal where I'd espied him. "Wait," he said. "You not never know."

I've been around explosives work so know to give it its moment of denouement, for rigs malfunction and people make mistakes. After a bit—I could tell he was counting under his breath, though the numbers he was mouthing weren't English numbers—he allowed we could go on. He introduced himself as John Johannson, one of the system's blasters. He'd lost his leg in a Colorado mine accident two years prior, suggesting to me that his track record may have fallen short but the company, desperate, hired him. He must have sensed my trepidation, for he laughed and said, "Canal Company figure I die they pay my wife yust three-quarter benefit."

I chuckled at that and introduced myself, imagining we'd be connecting semi-frequently in the future. "Emmaline, my wife, cook for the crew," he said, "At Big Fill. Five miles." He pointed in what would be the downstream direction, once there was water.

We rode toward the blast site, the bank too strewn with broken rock now to hoof it through. "Good blow," John said, apprising his work. We went outside the canal's left bank to bypass the debris. "I ride with you a bit, house there." It wasn't hard to see, the only one within view. I adjudged two miles away.

I learned a lot in those two miles—settlers are lonely, I discovered, ever eager to talk, are almost always a reservoir of words. John, his wife, and a mining friend had come in November a year prior, gone to town for lumber one day, built a house the next and moved in the day after that. In the spring he put in a crop, went back to Colorado to collect three orphaned nieces and nephews, then returned. The dry farm crop, no water being near yet, did alright, he said, but it was his canal work that paid the bills and with her cooking this spring he figured they would tough it out another year. "Got to beat mining," he said, eyeing his missing leg.

I declined his offer of supper, suspecting I might not escape both he and his wife's need for company and not knowing how far I yet had to go. The sun was already on its afternoon arc and I had to get to the Fill, where I was to be met by a company employee and shown my quarters. John rode south about a mile—his home, solitary and evident, was the only dwelling amidst the brush—and I continued downstream, to my right the Big Southern, getting taller with the dwindling light, and to the distant left a wavering border of bare trees betraying the Snake River's position in the basin beneath the southeast foothills. Ferry Butte, Ross Butte at one time, I estimated being about three miles distant that direction, with a range of mountains to the south, a set of low hills now casting shadows, providing the basin's rim.

I came to the second reservoir in less than half a mile. Not as big as the first, it would provide, I could see, water for the area southeast toward Lowe, an enclave descended from one of the the early Mormon Church's prominent polygamists. Of his fifty-plus children, I didn't know which or how many were settled down there, but I knew one of them would be sourcing our fill gravel for the drop into the Lowline. Since he lived five or six miles downstream from his brethren and thus set apart, I suspected he might be less of the Mormon fold than his brothers.

I reached just north of Danilson Spring, the unfinished canal roughly a half mile away from the creek's head, where lava rocks started taking up a greater percentage of the landscape. Johannson had plenty of work to do, I could see. On the Butte side of the canal, a farmer wouldn't be able to drive a team and plow, either straight or weaving, between the knolls, while on the south side the rock outcroppings dotted the landscape more randomly and sparsely. I'd be spending time overseeing work here, the craggy bottom of the canal an obvious place of seepage. The wind was picking up, the air getting colder, the light threatening to go dim on me, and I spurred the bay on ever so slightly, wishing to pick up a little speed. I was unaware of what accommodations I might meet.

It was but about three miles when I saw a figure astride a horse, a mustang—not so commonly ridden, though numerous amongst the wild herds that still roamed the desert—on the bank of the canal ahead of me, and though dusk was fast approaching I could tell I was near the Big Fill. A massive work lay incomplete, a disarray of equipment spanning a considerable area near both banks. A kit home was up, possibly my quarters. This is what I'd be tackling for the next couple years. I scanned the countryside south, knowing there would be a draw that went clear to the Tilden bottoms—I'd originally been told the creek that runs through it ran from fifteen miles out into the desert, but that report came in the springtime during high runoff and was fueled by optimism. The nearest water to the north was at the Big Southern a good twenty miles further out. I pulled up to the figure, who was facing the setting sun, said, "I assume this is it?"

She turned and said, "This is it."

© 2025 Ralph Thurston