BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 40

1920

DANIEL

Three, four times a year Daniel has passed through this part of the desert, ever since he came in '04 and rode the Mackay Branch out to help preliminary engineering on the Lost River canal projects. That first year, on his way back, he got off at the Cerro Grande crossing where he joined John Reilh, who was to give him the lay of the land. Reilh and his brother staked Desert Claims and were dry farming them, having bet on the Dubois Project going through. While they were working on the railroad they had spotted some promising land, but the water was yet to come and the canal project, its million acre reach proposed a decade before, had yet to see its first shovelful of dirt moved. A goodly stack of paperwork, however, had been trundled from desk to desk, office to office, bureaucracy to bureaucracy, with financiers, speculators, government officials and engineers like Daniel himself taking turns at making a go of it. That paperwork was finally coming to a head, but the Reilhs had met their end years before when a train ran over them in the night.

Bernard Delzer, at Cerro Grande, had secured a fresh horse for him and boarded Daniel's tired bay for the day. He seemed a trustworthy sort, Bothwell and McConaughy having vouched for him, so Daniel was somewhat free with his talk. Riding through the vast acreage, Blossom revealed that there was a smaller scheme in the works that he'd been working on, which was why he had his surveying equipment with him. He intended to take initial readings from the top of the Butte, yet again, in order to get good coordinates given the distance the project would go. It covered a fraction of the original plan of two decades prior when the Carey Act passed, a time of big notions. That plan was a monumental one which ran from Chester to American Falls. That proposal skirted the foothills to the north and cut just east of the Big Southern Butte before heading south. Bothwell, McConaughy's and his scheme was an ambitious project, but smaller than the original one proposed by big Eastern money. That scheme had to traverse lava beds, swamp land, and sand dunes, as well as the sinks that the Lost River ran into, the name of that area itself a description of the underlying terrain's porosity. Daniel sometimes wondered if all they had done was just draw a line on a map without ever having sent engineers out to the site.

Though Delzer had no time to join him for the entire day, he escorted him to the foot of the Big Southern's north side, and from there Daniel filled his canteens and began the trek to the top. Daniel didn't have the heart to tell him that the project, even if undertaken, wouldn't reach his acreage. At least not without a pumping station to elevate any lateral canal.

He sees disappointment most everywhere. It's not that he likes or wants to see it, but he does like to see that it exists without him causing it. When he arrived in Idaho he was filled with a promise akin to that possessed by the settlers—but not being a farmer himself, just associated with the progressive movement from wilderness to agriculture. He'd seen variations of that promise and hope wither again and again, the posture of the pioneers weighted a little more with each year, as affected by conditions as the few trees that survived out in the open, their trunks bent and misshapen from the constant winds. He'd come to doubt his original excitement of providing water and success to a migrating populace, on bad days viewing his actions as that of a shyster promoter, one selling a product he knew was of little value.

But the Volga Germans out at Taber had failed without him, and as the years moved from their first arrival in 1913 to the present he saw the same progression in their faces and postures that he'd seen working on the canal's claimants. Most had already left, though Seisser, whose hotel he'd stayed at the prior night, still had hopes—there was the possibility of the revived Dubois Project in the works, the local paper's editor and the promotion committee sponsoring a recent tour for reporters and government officials, both state and federal, in order to drum up support. It had been a daylong affair taken by a string of automobiles, complete with lunch and a hike to the top of the East Butte of the Twins.

As he and Seisser shared a meal the prior evening—Daniel being the only guest he'd had for some time, Seisser admitted—the man's demeanor oscillated between despair (over the developments of the last few years) and a childlike excitement (over the coming land boom if the Bureau okayed the Dubois Project). His English had improved since he arrived seven years earlier, enough so that Daniel and he could converse without too much difficulty. German and Russian words crept into Seisser's delivery and his accent veered this way, then that, keeping Daniel aurally alert, but he believed he understood fully—though he knew that any meaning, any fact, might be shaved away into something other than itself, doomed by the unavoidable failure of untranslatable words.

Seisser was still smarting from Mayor Peck's wartime mob. Seisser explained to Daniel that the Germans there were Volga Germans, a group that had immigrated to Russia two centuries prior. The czar wanted to populate the Ukrainian dry farmlands and promised exemption from military service and taxes. The Germans had been allowed to maintain their language and independence, which they did, rarely intermarrying with Russians. A few decades ago those early agreements faded away, leading to an exodus which had increased even more rapidly in the last decade as unrest rocked Russia.

Sometimes locals referred to them as Russian, sometimes as German, that latter status making them a target for the Blackfooters. "Men too scared to go fight real soldiers," Seisser spat, describing them.

Despite the county's dry status, Seisser poured whiskey freely as he and Daniel talked through the night. He was a loquacious man, as those in isolated areas can sometimes be, but on occasion—if, for instance, he needed to relieve himself or refill a glass, or something disturbed the flow of his thoughts and reversed the mode of speaking into listening—he questioned Blossom, working up from canal history to the proposed canal route soon to be decided upon. A predictable question, Blossom thought—without rancor, since the Highline would be the difference between Taber's abject failure and an economic boom.

Daniel described his day's journey to Seisser, a ride starting in Woodville and then taking the route surveyed years before. He felt he needed to retrace it, refresh his memory, in case the Bureau asked him for particulars. Seisser was somewhat familiar with the plan but interrupted Daniel for explanations from time to time. The narrows near Woodville came into question, and Daniel described the extent of work that would be needed to get through that area—a cut as deep as fifty feet for not too long a distance, considering the benefits of irrigating a quarter million acres downstream.

The lavas came into discussion, too. Seisser wondered how he rode a horse across them. Daniel laughed. "I went lazy, decided to rely on memory," he said. "I could have walked it, but not with a horse. I went south, down along the Great Western for a bit until I got to the edge of the beds. Then, north again." Seven miles to go one, he told Seisser, a lengthy discursion.

Seisser asked about the Big Bend area situated in the lavas, an area that would be picked up by the Highline for irrigation. He knew other Volga Germans had settled there and was disappointed when Daniel told him it had been all but abandoned, the cropland turned to cheatgrass and tumbleweed, shacks falling down. Daniel steered from further description, sensing that Seisser saw in their demise his own.

His route had come to the lavas again, the horse unable to foot through the fissures and crags so requiring another extended bypass, but going was easy once he'd made it back up to the route line and he'd gotten to Taber before sundown. Seisser interrupted him frequently, asking about particular settlers and their farms, and though Daniel didn't know the names Seisser filled him in as he moved along. Sandau gone. The Italian Locatelli gone. Willicke, Kassel, hanging on but Kassel claiming this year was his last if it didn't go well. Seisser laughed at this. "Every year he say this," he said. Daniel didn't argue, but he believed Kassel meant it this time around.

"Seisser," Seisser reflected, "In English this means mower. And here I am, nothing to mow." He stretched his arm out and slowly slung it around. "I sell lumber. I run hotel. I have groceries. I am Postman. My farm, not so much to mow." He drank deeply, Blossom joining him with a commiserating mien, no condoling words or advice at hand.

A hundred men had lined up at Blackfoot's Land Office a half dozen years before, when the government opened up several ranges for homesteading. Daniel had ridden through the claimed area the following June, one that followed a year of heavy snows, to see lush acreages of flax, oats and wheat, a few gardens with potatoes and other vegetables, the women smiling, if they were nearby, as he passed, the farmers he met eager to talk but lacking much English. Daniel, experienced after over a decade dealing with immigrants from Scandinavia, Russia, Germany, Italy and even France, could negotiate much of his way with any language—with the aid of visual clues and gestures—so was a welcome conversant for the settlers, who were eager for news, eager to share, hungry for any sort of difference to break a pattern that inevitably, even when loved, needed to change.

A long spell of rain in June made the wheat crop a bumper one that year, and the new claimants wrote back to families with excited news and promise, bringing yet more immigrants. Another good crop, reaching thirty and forty bushels—triple the normal yield, followed the next year, and every settler expanded his small acreage that he'd carved from his original claim in order to prove up to include double, even triple the land, expecting an equivalent increase in income.

But the climate returned to normal, 'tired of teasing', Daniel had heard it described. Just one round of dry winter, dry spring, dry summer and the resulting crop failure broke the will of those who touted their earlier success most loudly. Those who hung in for another year, a little more judicious in their expenditures and having room for doubt, saw drought yet again, one whittling away yet more of the arrivals. A meager but adequate harvest followed the next year, but it had been drought ever since, yielding farm sale after sale, abandoned shacks left empty save for that which couldn't be carried or wasn't worth taking.

He'd left Seisser's at dawn, gone out to Delzer's, would hit the top of the Butte and make his quick readings, come down, get his horse and make it part of the way back home. He'd just drop his bedroll when he or the horse got tired.

***

His trip southwesterly the next day looked much the same as the trip from the lavas to Taber, a mix of rock knolls and broad valleys that the Highline would make arable. Some of the ground showed the marks of abandoned grain fields, strips of scraggly stubble left from a harvest years before and yielding to cheatgrass. He passed Tillie Johnson's with a curse on his lips, a brief set of expletives against Mormons as blistering as the rising heat. The canal, if it were to be, would just catch the lower half of this section and southward, turn the sere patch of weeds into wheat, barley, potatoes, sugar beets or maybe even alfalfa for another round of dreamers unprepared for wakefulness. Some would succeed, most would fail, all would try.

Bothwell and McConaughy, he suspected, never felt one way or another about their enterprises' effects either before or after they left. It was 'just facts' to them, a series of steps to make money, a schedule of tasks to keep to, a project broken into parts to undertake and complete. They no doubt felt some sort of satisfaction, though they never showed it, a sense of success they didn't display, an excitement upon beginning that everyone experiences though you wouldn't guess it from their manner. That was how successful people were, Daniel had decided, they just didn't care the same way that others did, those accustomed to failure and fearing more of the same.

He had admitted it, he was still a child. Easily lured and easily fooled, quick to glee and equally swift to despair. But he was quicker to recover than earlier in his life, he was a slow learner but at least had learned. The parts in between starts and end, between upslopes and down, he'd become better at. He had discovered methods to throttle his imagination, to cushion the sudden fall from dream to reality. Those igniters—anticipation and promise, dread and remorse—now lacked much power, but still he was a slave to those initial natural impulses. He harbored no hope of ever overcoming them.

Every new claimant he met, though, came with an intertwined set of triggers that set off a dynamite-like emotional process in him. He shared their excitement of a new life even as he predicted the impending decrepitude that would follow. Sometimes one side of that equation would win—he would strike up a relationship—and sometimes the other would—he would avoid any interaction greater than a word or two—and he came away from either reaction regretting what he had just done.

When he first came through this country it was all promise. He saw it green up, a miracle of man, from the canal southward. This trip through the same land, though, was filled with failure, broken pledges, the dry farmers having tried to copy the irrigators' success but falling short. They left a weedy, dusty remnant of their history.

But for those settlers remaining, few as they were, and for the land itself, which prospective settlers might be altering if the Reclamation ruled favorably, there was a renewed promise that he, in great part, played a role in, as surveyor, as inspiration. It was his suggestion of its possibility one day at the office, when Bothwell and McConaughy were recalling the old Dubois project's foolhardy improvisers, that spurred the consequent preparation and planning.

He'd also been called to serve as the project's booster, a role baffling him at times, as he at once was behind every land entrant's foray into dream and yet somehow responsible for their subsequent failure, if indeed they failed (and they probably would fail). He recoiled, even cringed, when he saw mistakes being made, when he felt weather being uncooperative, when he witnessed markets dropping. And then there were those other disasters befalling everyone, sickness and injury and death.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston