BIG SOUTHERN (CHAPTER 4)

1878

JOHN GARRISON

You walk across enough territory, you start noticing differences you generally miss at first glance. A traveler, eyes to the horizon and mind off in the future to the end of his destination, be it Oregon likely but maybe it being the mines up to Lemhi or Challis, just sees sagebrush, other scraggly bushes, a cedar, wild onions if in bloom maybe or desert parsley when it's seeding out. He sees rocks, gullies and impediments on one hand and his intended trail on the other, has no need of other categories. He might see an antelope or a rabbit but mostly, after a few dreary miles, he won't be looking like he was looking at first, the consequent spareness imbedded in his mind totted up as another barren lack on this plain they once called the Shanghi.

But if you're a surveyor, your horizon generally sits closer than that of someone just passing through. Your first reading in a new, unsurveyed place might be fairly broad and extensive, but then you funnel your attention down to a more detailed area. Our first look, for instance, reached south from atop the Big Southern Butte to the Snake River, then moved to a high point just four miles from here at McTucker's Creek. From those readings we caught the first triangulation for the survey intended to open up the Desert Claim areas, though some early entrants already marked their entries—always off of the proper meridians and base lines and therefore making our job just that much more difficult. Four or five miles east, the same area south and again west, that's what we've been contracted to do. We're nearly done.

As you count chain lengths stepping northward, southward, westward, eastward, you see details, often stumbling on them inadvertently, your attention to the ground much of the time. You rarely let your attention wander too far lest you ruin your work and have to start over again, but your mind does pick up any stray difference that breaks the expected monotony. You've likely experienced something similar, just haven't considered it. Maybe when you were talking to your wife and a hawk swooped into view at the corner of your eye. Try as you might not to, you looked, and whatever excuse you gave didn't suffice: you weren't listening, she'll have said, though you were.

The intentional part of your mind is at the mercy of its second, hidden part, a part which some— mistakenly, by my reckoning—call a guardian angel or even, according to Chinamen, the ancestors looking over you. I prefer to call that part a backup plan, because if you are too attentive you quickly tire—that backup takes care of business so you can carry on with more important things. You would go mad if you focussed too hard for too long, we are meant to move, our eyes are meant to move, and if we don't move the world will move for us.

My mentor equated surveying to God's work. God named the animals and the plants, he said, we surveyors use numbers instead of words to make similar delineations upon the earth, separating one place from another so we can both remember it when needed and forget it when it's unnecessary. You stick a stake in the ground, he said, now there is a reference point. Name a kind of plant, a sort of animal, now you see how it differs from others. God, and we, provide templates.

One shrub, unnamed, seems like another until your eyes snag on a change of color, size or shape, until you see a difference, for instance, between a healthy wormwood specimen and a withering counterpart. We men make fun of women who can tell one kind of cloth from another and such like things, our eyes sliding right by any array of material, it all just a blur, but women are not being frivolous, are just utilizing the same principles of attention men use but on a different set of goods. I have been to museums and heard people talking about paintings in such a way that reminds me of stockmen talking about horses, their attention attuned to a particular area that fully evades my interest. Other than perhaps noticing color and size, my appraisal of any art is lacking alongside theirs. Add music to the list of things I have no knowledge of and care naught for, as I will run when I see a fiddle brought out, every scratchy tune sounding the same to me though I know musicians would say otherwise.

Soil likewise has its differences, a good farmer tasting a new plot of ground to determine if it is chalky and sweet or fizzy and sour, each kind of earth good for a different set of plants. If he doesn't want to taste it he might instead look at it, a white surface often a sign of extreme salt. It all just looks like dirt until you pay attention. Here, a lightening of the surface tells you it's been recently disturbed if the immediately surrounding area sports a different color. Or, if the change isn't chaotic but uniform, it might just tell you that the topsoil washed away with the runoff over millennia.

Generally, the soil through this plain has the same layers wherever you go. There's topsoil, all sweet, varying from a couple inches deep to a couple feet or more in rare places, a layer of clay beneath that, and then a third layer, the thickest, that tends to differ more from area to area than the upper two layers. Gravel, in some places, of different sizes varying from small as your thumbnail to large as your kneecap—I imagine that size differing in accordance to where the river once coursed through. There's sand in other spots.

If someone digs a hole and doesn't replace the layers in the same order he removed them, which he never does, you'll see a vivid change between the surrounding area and what was once a hole and is now a filled hole. Add to that the depression left in the surface, a result of air pockets being lost in the alteration process. Just go to a graveyard. A good digger leaves a mound, knowing the earth, despite its recent addition taking up considerable space, will pull the dirt above downward. But even an expert gravedigger rarely gets it fully right, and after a few years an outline emerges to betray where he dug.

There's sand to upset these truisms, pockets from place to place that might be forty square feet or forty acres in size, and lava knolls and fingers, some minute and some sizable, that intrude into the discussion. Throw in the canal-like depressions where spring rivulets move winter snow from the higher desert areas toward the river, mostly not reaching that far, and you confound the generalization further. You see old trails, too, that stick an asterisk on your theory, befuddling it, some made by buffalo or elk or horse, some being wagon ruts that are deep when cutting through topsoil and some actually wearing away areas of rock, the lava being relatively soft here. Some trails you barely see, having been taken but perhaps once. These are visible, though, because the desert, while tough and sometimes fatal to those crossing it, is yet a fragile thing and even one pass across it leaves its record for decades after.

Leave all those details be and you need know little else other than you can see a change if you just pay attention. I imagine Indian trackers notice changes much smaller than the ones I perceive and the ones I see are smaller than the Governor's were when he came through. Riding through the territory once gave him a vivid impression but it didn't give him an understanding. I read his statements in the newspaper and he's either intentionally lying to bring in unsuspecting settlers, thereby improving his reputation as a draw for economic expansion, or simply misrepresenting the truth because he was relying more on imagination than perception.

I have been here for weeks now and it seems I understand the land less with every passing day. After surveying thirty square miles of desert, much as I appreciate the terrain, I appreciate it less as it repeats itself. I am therefore happy in arriving here at the river, a different landscape with water and vegetation of a sort differing from the desert's. A kind of soil without rock, save on river bars and at the bluff. A unique set of animals not seen on the desert, mink and otter and beaver and muskrat. I haven't seen buffalo, which they say once roamed here, as did elk in small numbers. I was warned of the chance of a bear showing up, hence I sleep ready with a firearm loaded and nearby. The recent Shoshone unrest spurred that decision in part, I must admit.

Though I am a surveyor on new ground in the relatively new Idaho Territory (just fifteen years old as an official entity) "new" is a strange term, one requiring, like a survey itself, reference points. The land itself is hardly new, thousands of years old if you're a Biblicist, millions if you follow Mr. Darwin's (and James Hutton's before him by a good many decades) new ideas put forth in the colleges. The natives have been here for some time, too, long before the government's recent collection that crowds them into the Reservation just south across the river, less than a mile away. The Astors, the trappers after them, Wyeth and the Hudson's Bay, the numerous pioneers, the Mormons, came through sixty, fifty, forty, twenty years ago. So it's new here in one sense, hardly so in another.

I don't wander through all the ground, I couldn't, but I catalog evidence of relative newness. Wagon trails mostly. A ragged fence or two here and there out on the Tilden flats where some of the first claims already have been made, those bob wire lines harbingers of civilization on its way. I don't write down all I see, every cattle trail or horse biscuit or arrowhead, but I can see how every new path breaks an old certainty—the soil here on the desert, dry as it is, has a crust that feels spongy as you walk, and if you break through that thin top layer it loses its bounce. Also its porosity. It holds a pretty good rainstorm, left alone, but once cows come through, even a few of them, enough of a fissure develops to eliminate that ability. With any slope at all, a rut ensues and a ravine appears if the slope is great. The topsoil runs away, leaving shards of lava and an alkali layer that turns white in the summer. It doesn't take much to disturb that bit of surface, no more than it would take to break your skin, really, and I can spot where I've ridden back and forth even a year later, even though I am no Shoshone tracker.

There are natural washes and draws where the power of a runoff broke through to the lower soils right down to the hard clay. That sturdy bottom takes more than water to break through it. Sometimes a shovel does not suffice and a pick is required. I could continue on, amaze myself with the details I've accumulated, but the point has been made: you look at anything long enough, you start to discern differences. But there are differences that even the inattentive spot. Like up from where I now camp, about a hundred yards north and slightly west—close enough to the section line that I saw it right away.

From time to time in the past two years I have spotted a number of like areas, the first of which I investigated with the result of unburying a body from its shallow grave. I am not squeamish, I don't think, having experienced the War Against Slavery, but I did not linger long at that place. I stuck around long enough to be sure there were no bullet holes in the body, the first thing that comes to mind out here, but I did not look more closely, and then I just filled up the hole again and marked it with a cross made of sagebrush limbs tied together with hemp. Having that experience behind me, I'm going to leave well enough alone, leave the place up yonder, whether it is a grave or not, unmeddled with.

The crossing of this plain isn't ever so easy that death cannot strike, whether from sickness or violence or random act of God, and the only place to leave the dead is where they die. I have come upon a dozen spots almost identical to that first find, each differing only in how far along nature has reclaimed it, what grows there revealing the amount of time having passed. I do not know the names of these plants, save bunchgrass, sagebrush, rabbit brush, and something cattlemen call winterfat but which looks like a stunted sagebrush, but each of these species and others each take a certain time to return to their place and just by paying a little attention you quickly see how new a grave or disruption of another sort is.

It's a grave, my bet is, dug twenty or less years ago given the as yet unrecovered surface of the soil. I keep a small notebook containing the locations of such places. Just in case someone is looking for a missing family member. Someone may be expecting them to be deceased, may be intent on reburial in home ground. And it's always conceivable the law might be looking for the victim of foul play, seeking proof of a murder. I no longer possess the curiosity to exhume these spots, my experience unpleasant enough to crush any underlying impulse. Even when I find the sites in the spring, when the soil is wet enough for easy digging, I just turn away from temptation at once. Now, the parched ground so dry I'd need a chisel to break beyond the first couple inches, I don't waste time considering applying a shovel. Not a bit.

©2025 Ralph Thurston