BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 36

LATE JULY 1910

DANIEL

Garrison's lecture, filled with hyperbole about the West's beauty, lured me out here, visions of something besides Vermont's greenery being mighty attractive. But even more, the land's openness, its scope, drew me, too. Most of all, the elbow room, not just in physical space but in social configurations, sealed the decision to abandon my roots. In Vermont, opportunities went to the families of those who already had opportunity, and while my family was one amongst those, the choices offered were not ones I wished to take.

Five years working this canal, half that of the decade spent by the Skeens who struggled before us, and now Bothwell, McConaughy and I celebrate closing in. Last week I delivered the system map, sixteen feet by four, to Boise and presented our case for completion, the Department of Interior to render their decision soon. Then we can turn the canal over to the users—Bothwell and McConaughy are already considering their next project, one taking up the land to the northwest almost clear to the Big Southern Butte. Then there are their Nevada mine operations, some already underway.

"Do you think it's a coincidence, Robert?" Glen Bothwell rolls the whiskey in his shot glass in a clockwise motion—you have to 'swirl it so' in the northern hemisphere, he always said, the opposite way that liquids normally go, and if you were in the world's southern half you had to do the opposite. When I had asked if he'd ever been across the equator, he just looked at me and asked back, "Have you?"

"Ironic, but not a coincidence," McConaughy says. "The temperance girls have been at it since Bingham was a County, it's just that it's tame enough now to make the county dry just as our canal starts making it wet." McConaughy drinks. "Call it McConaughy's theory of opposites." He laughs an empty laugh, his words with just a hint of his family's brogue left in them—he was barely of speaking age when they came to the U.S. "The Indians would say it's Coyote at work. I don't agree with them much, but I can appreciate a God that likes a good twist in a story."

"T.R. will profit from the twist, you watch." Bothwell knocks his drink back. He looks at me slyly. "As will others."

"That whisky aged?" I ask Bothwell to jar his attention from his train of thought.

McConaughy has a vast opinion, one rarely used or needed on the alcoholic fare offered here, on the quality of drink. He grins as Bothwell looks silently at his empty shot glass, pondering its worthiness. "If the delivery man's horse lost a shoe," McConaughy says for him, "Then it's aged. In comparison. Otherwise not."

Bothwell laughs. "Not aged, that's my appraisal," he says. He motions for Mrs. Stearman to refill our glasses. I put my hand up, signaling 'no'.

"Nora must be giving you trouble," McConaughy says to me, noticing my lagging pace—I am two shots behind.

"A bit," I say, hoping I not to color with embarrassment. I drink up, as if to prove myself still in command of my thoughts.

"Kind of a surprise," Bothwell says, after Mrs. Stearman has poured. She swats the flies away from our table without actually killing any, and they return, along with her dishrag, like a boat in a bay moving in and out with the waves. "Considering her—at one time, at least—full enjoyment of a snort or two."

"Tillie Johnson, there's some influence there." McConaughy's voice registers a slight disdain. Nora had been spending a great deal of time with the woman, who had filed on land next to hers. "Does she know Tillie is a polygamist?"

"How can she not be aware? Everyone else knows." Bothwell says.

McConaughy shrugs. "Hard to tell what's rumor, what's secret." He winks at me.

It may not matter if she's polygamist, but Mathilda Johnson does have sway over Nora. Things between us have changed since Tillie moved in over by Nora's land, a quarter mile south of headquarters. Once a devout Presbyterian, at least in that we went to the same church on occasion together, Nora now fills my ear with a different reading of the Bible—Joseph Smith's and Brigham Young's. She whispers corrections even as Reverend Swarz speaks during meetings. She has asked me to attend the Mormon assembly down at Tilden just to experience it. "It's only fair," she says, but I recoil. It would be like walking into a pack of agitated animals, maybe safe, maybe getting torn apart.

I look through the big picture window, dirtied as it is by the meager raindrops of recent storms mixing with the dust of subsequent winds—a deadly combination for upwind-facing glass that Mrs. Stearman hasn't noticed since the hotel was completed a couple months ago. Halvor Berg and George Chandler are walking up from the lake below us. The two old-timers constructed the dam making the lake—after Danilson's smaller one failed and he moved on to his store in Blackfoot. They can only be headed to the General Store or to E.T. Shelman's shop, probably not to here, frugal as they are. They wouldn't consider paying for a meal when their wives can cook, though they gladly accept a drink if someone else pays for it.

Berg is a talkative man with a Scandinavian accent and a wry attitude, the combination tripping up his verbiage, either trait getting ahead of the other. I ran into him often on the canal to the north—during its building but moreso afterward, his tendency being to keep watch on any passers-through. I recall one of his more loquacious moments, when he may have just stopped at George Burgess's for a snort from George's stash in his granary. I was eyeing the water funneling from the canal into its rock-fissured floor—despite my extensive and repeated puddling work. That water, I was pretty sure, ended up in the spring just south, as Danilson's rose two feet when we turned the water in in the spring, then dropped when the water went out.

On the bank, I was in the process of marking—for future repair—where the eddies betrayed water loss when Berg rode up. He watched, nodded, after a very long moment related his encounter with another whirlpool. The 'maelstrom', he called it, an enormous ocean funnel that he claimed drove him from Norway and into the inland United States—'as far from the sea as I could go,' he said. Nora understood Berg well and mimicked his accent perfectly, but I had to translate, as I was listening, what was being said, sometimes losing the thread of the conversation. His interspersing of mangled English with Norwegian phrases sometimes left me feeling blindfolded, as if I were spun around for a game of pin the tail on the donkey.

Halvor claimed to have been aboard a fishing vessel that got caught in the maelstrom, a whirlpool so large that the crew feared it would never escape. It spun them around its rim three times, as if giving them a chance to decide their fate. Even the atheists prayed, he claimed, before it let them go—'like a cat toying with a mouse,' he said, 'it just play like we be nothing.' he was not a religious man, he avowed, but he was 'more religious now.' He packed to immigrate the next day, he said, not taking any discussion with his wife Erma.

Daniel had noticed that he avoided looking at the eddy below them.

Berg and Chandler now pass out of sight.

"Just a suggestion, Mr. Blossom." It was Bothwell's voice. He turns toward me. It takes me a moment to understand that he refers to the side business he believes I conduct. And which I do. "Avoid the Lowes. You'll be going right by Landon's place every load you take to Pocatello." He sips, sets his glass down, puts his elbows on the table and clasps his hands together. "Very fortuitous, him being right on the junction to the new Tilden Bridge. Robert, do you think he has some clout with the commissioners?"

"Could do. Could do."

"I assure you, Daniel, he'll be informing his relatives every time he sees you." The Guttings lived to the west just two miles in Otis, and Landon's brothers were upstream near Ferry Butte. "They are bound to disapprove of you cutting into their business."

My laugh, hollow as it is, signifies my dismissal of his warning. "Being Mormons," I say, "What exactly will they do?"

Bothwell looks to McConaughy, who returns a look of knowing agreement. "I guess you weren't here when they killed their brother—"

"Adopted brother," McConaughy clarifies.

"Foster brother," Bothwell corrects him back, "If we're getting particular. Quarterbreed. Survivor of the Bear River massacre in the sixties. Just a baby then. Maybe related to the medicine woman over to Chesterfield. That could just be talk, though." He sips. "Horace was selling 'shine for near a decade to the Indians. Since day one when Heber, the old man, homesteaded. Then he went and got caught. Not a good look for the family. An honest look, but not a good one."

I have heard the story many, many times from a number of angles though none matched this one. Horace's death was mysterious, the murder unsolved, but I had not heard it attributed to the family. Bothwell continues,"The prosecutor, Mr. Hawley—"

"Now your esteemed governor," McConaughy interrupts.

"Mr. Hawley delayed the trial when it came to court. 'the evidence is flimsy,' he said. 'Let the next session deal with it.' An election was coincidentally coming up, you see." He holds his shot glass up, eyes us all, drains it, then speaks. "Horace's body was found on the railroad tracks the next morning. In pieces."
 "Not small enough pieces, however," McConaughy adds, chuckling. "They found two bullet holes in the heart. That ain't a train's doing."

I don't interrupt. One part of the story was certainly true: the perpetrators had shot him and hoped the train would destroy any evidence. They left the body on Reservation tracks so the local sheriff had no jurisdiction. It was just bad luck on their part that the train didn't mangle the body as badly as they'd expected.

"Hawley had a good business going. Judge Lowe was involved. They both were afraid Horace would spill his story to avoid jail time. That's why Hawley delayed the trial."

McConaughy cleared his throat. "Family connections, important as they are to Mormons, can't get in the way of money."

The patriarch, Heber, had spoke at the Pingree townsite christening and land auction just two weeks before. He had talked about the 'bad blood' being ended in the war between the Skeens and the United. Everyone would now profit from 'getting along'.

I didn't relay my familiarity with the Lowes, for the fewer people know of my side enterprise, the better. Bothwell and McConaughy know what they know but they don't know the whole of it. The Lowes were fully in on my intended routes. We weren't competitors, we were partners, of a sort. As of yet, anyway. "I'll take it under advisement," I say. "Should I enter the profession further."

McConaughy laughs. "You have a car. You have a road. You have a bridge. You have a good excuse to be on the road. No sheriff's going to stop you. If you're not in the business already, you will be. It's just looking too lucrative." He thought a minute. "Hell, I'd get in it if I was younger."

Bothwell winks at McConaughy, lifts his shot glass and empties it. "Just watch yourself. Know who you're dealing with. They patented land where they patented it figuring to be toll collectors, Heber's place has Meek's Ferry tied up and Landon's watching those going west or north through Tilden. There's only the one road going either way, and they have it covered."

McConaughy drains his glass, too, shakes it to free any remaining drop. "Now the daughter married Sam Gutting's boy, so they have the Sterling connection, too. And an outlet in Blackfoot, his hotel bar."

T.R. has already informed me of the situation. We plan to procure product at Taber, coming off the train, until we get local men to supply us. Martin Rossi already has equipment heading out to a spot in the lavas, Jake Martin is setting up at Sterling, Colborn has a unit at Grandview. There will be no shortage of stills. The Lowes make theirs, but we don't have to buy from them once those other stills are up. We can sell to them, though, let them keep the Reservation business.

"Point taken," I say.

We drink, perhaps the last time legally, and watch the ducks fly into and out of the lake below. Some boys galavant at the shore, it appears they may have some willow poles fashioned for fishing but they aren't watching them, instead scamper up and down the bank chasing each other. The train whistle sounds, so it will be coming into view in about a minute, stopping down at the makeshift loading dock. There's still hope from some quarters for a depot here but Pingree up-track and Sterling down-track already have the railroad's stamp. The sump water in the spring, they say, limits a Springfield depot's usefulness, but I suspect there's been some political maneuvering one way or the other that spurred the decision.

"When those canes weren't on the wall anymore I knew something was up," Bothwell says. His eyes are upon me, wanting to note my reaction, but I ignore his comment.

"The office is 'bout like cheatgrass in July these days," McConaughy replies. "A sad old place but ready to spark. I used to enjoy going in to check up on things but it just ain't the same. Nora's sparkle, it needs some polishing, that's what I'd say."

I ignore his comment, too. Soon, we get up, shake hands, and part. Bothwell and McConaughy are heading to Nevada as soon as the train gets back from Aberdeen on the return trip.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston