BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER SIX

1863

URIAH AND LOUISA

Still in the penumbra of the old Fort Hall's crumbled, white adobe walls, Louisa and Uriah watch the two horsemen follow the river westward until they go out of view, both of them aware of a danger just averted. The two seemed like bad men is all, jumpy one moment, fully at ease the next, nothing you could exactly say to mark them as criminal as they were neither violent nor crude, save the swearing that seemed a part of most men's lives here, the chinking between other words that kept a conversation from letting in too much of outside forces, silence amongst them.

"We need to get," she tells him, suddenly scrambling to collect their belongings. When she sees him standing, frozen, she growls, "Get!"

Accustomed to her moods, he assents, hooks up the team, the pair of mules willing but slow, while Louisa fusses with the two girls in the back of the wagon. It's not like her, he thinks through his alacrity, to rush so, to not wash more thoroughly, to not tie up every loose item, fold up and secure, to leave things in disarray. He hesitates but asks, "Do you wish to explain the hurry?"

"I'll tell you, just get up, get going." She is already in her seat, motioning for him to join her as he makes the last cinch. "Get going!" she adds.

She points north when he climbs aboard. "We're crossing the river."

"I thought we'd decided otherwise," he protests.

"Decision changed when circumstance changed. Cross the river at the ford, where we was told, it's as easy a place as we'll get and the closest."

It is not wholly unlike her to give him instructions, though at important moments she is normally an obedient wife as scripture and the prophet says to be, and he obeys, stricken as he is from the sudden change from her earlier mood while sitting with the strangers.

They come to Baugh's Ford, the water appearing swift to him. He balks. "It's only worse upstream and down," she says, knowing his mind. She grabs the reins and jerks, spurring the mules on into the stream. "I took their gold," she tersely states. "Not all of it, just enough, but if they stop and check they'll know."

The team enters the water and Uriah feels its force, first against the mules in their resistance and then against the wagon's wheels, moreso as they move toward the center of the river. He can hardly register what she has said.

"Surely you know they was robbers," she says.

His mind clings to the task at hand, steering the mules, one balky and the other working against that balkiness with its own, better intent, honoring Uriah's message delivered through the reins. "You stole," he says in a flat voice.

"Stole from stealers."

"What would the Lord say?" He barely has time to be appalled, the water reaching the bottom of the wagon. "What would our prophet say?"

She looks back at the girls, both feverish and barely aware of the situation.

"Which prophet? Brigham or Joe Morris? The live one or the dead one? Brigham would have you lie for the Lord, you know full well. And Joseph, you know how his sort of purity ended."

She is still upset over their conversion, unconvinced of Morris's status or his many revelations. "Any fool can hear God," she had said, "It's just themselves yelling into a canyon and not recognizing their own voice echoing." Only when Uriah invoked the scriptures did she consent to giving their belongings to the Morrisites to await the Lord's Coming, and after Brigham's mob killed Morris she refused to accompany General Connor with the other Morrisites all the way to Beer Springs. They followed behind the group for some time, keeping them in sight for a fair bit, then diverted paths, for they couldn't return to the Church without being ostracized, its members knowing of their defection, and she refused to be a part of the apostates who, not provided the Lord's protection against Brigham Young, surely must have been mistaken in their beliefs.

Theirs was a sudden decision, but Louisa's is more sudden still. "What have you done!" he cries, not knowing if to her or to himself or to the Lord. The splashing, the current, the reluctant mule and the eager mule working against each other twist the wagon and he tries to control them with the reins. "Hold!" he shouts, an instruction that sometimes the good mule heeds, but the noise of the water and the turbulence of the beasts' thrashing take precedence over his word.

"We'll have back what you gave away, that's what I've done," she mutters back.

Her insolence triggers something in him. "It's sinner's bounty!" he shouts. "You have damned yourself, if not us. We will suffer in the afterlife!"

"I am accustomed to suffering!" she screams back. "I would like to have a little less of it! The children would like to have less of it, too!" She calms, turns her voice to a reasonable level and modulation. "Consider it a blessing, an answer to prayers. The Lord would not deny his believers bounty taken from the wicked."

They both hear a croaky voice from behind them. Josephine has risen, lifted her head and crawled forward in the wagon and as they turn back to look the wagon strikes a rock in the river bed, jarring them badly. The jolt nearly throws them both off the seat and as they gather their balance the mules stumble and Josie falls forward into the water. The wagon rolls over her, her soft body barely causing a jolt to the heavy wagon's carriage.

Uriah hands Louisa the reins, jumps into the water which now reaches the wagon's floor and slightly above. He scrambles for the girl, his feet stumbling over her body. 'Josie!" he yells. Reaching into the river, his head underwater then back above and then back under, he finds her, picks her up into his arms. Louisa has stopped the wagon and he sets Josie into the back.

He stands behind the wagon, watching for Josie's breath, sees none. A seam of blood rises from a torn slash in her face where the wagon wheel has used her head, now a misshapen thing, for traction. The ton of goods they carry rolled over her, perhaps one wheel and then the one on the second axle, too, and he prays silently as Louisa holds the reins. Something like a wail, but something filled with anger, too, emits from her throat. She sees the lifeless body, knows that the Lord has given her retribution for her act.

Knowing they must not tarry now, whatever the circumstances, he leans over the back of the wagon, kisses the girl's forehead, scurries along the wagon side and gets up on it. He takes the reins, pushes the mules onward, the rest of the way easy, the water depth receding as they reach the opposite bank, their other daughter, who was the sickest, having barely moved. Across through the bottom land, neither speaking but Louisa quaking with unsaid grief, they go. A shallow stream impedes their path after a while and they cross it, then take the trail up the bluff that adjoins it, and they are up on the Shanghi Plain, near a trail leading toward the Big Southern Butte that towers in the distance, some twenty-five miles away they say and halfway to a lay of foothills where the going is easier, shade being nearby along with grass for the mules and with plentiful water for all of them.

He has not gone far, hardly a hundred yards, before she jerks the reins from him. "Bury her!" she screams.

He digs in, his anger now invoked, too, but in a different way. "We have to make time."

"Bury her now!" Her voice is that of a madwoman, shrieking, and he can only obey.

She is already in the wagon, opening a trunk, pulling its contents out without regard to where they land. "This will work."

He grabs their shovel, hands it to her, takes hold of the chest and though it weighs heavily, built strongly of a hardwood he doesn't recognize, he carries it, awkwardly, counting his steps from where they depart the trail. If they bury her close to the trail, Indians may dig her up, he believes. She follows with the shovel, but also has grabbed four small sacks which at first perplexes him but when he realizes he has never seen them realizes they are the gold she took.

A hundred paces due north from the "V" in the road, one leading northeast along the river toward the Montana stage trail eventually, the other leg northwest along the bluff and eventually reaching Boise City, he sets the chest down. She drops the sacks and begins to dig. "Get Josie," she says. "We'll bury the gold with her."

He does so.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston