BIG SOUTHERN (CHAPTER TEN)

1878

DANILSON

They called it pluff down in Carolina, a mispronunciation of plough, an easy enough mistake and one that took over the vernacular as mistakes often do. It was called that because when the waters recede what remains looks like a plow has just been through, clumps of wet sand, silt and loam mimicking a field laden with clods and roots.

The pluff here on the Snake River is a pale version of Carolina's both in color and odor. The smell down South was overwhelming when the war wasn't taking one's attention in other, more disturbing ways. I will always associate the scent with the stink of the English, their loyalist arrogance—of lords overseeing their domain and serfs if in England and their slaves if in America. Here, when the river and backwaters recede, pluff's distinct odor of busy rot just reminds you of the season, tells you that you might want to fish in faster-moving water lest you like a dinner that tastes of moss. The omnipresent wind here, rising as it does most every afternoon and erupting in little bursts even when the early morning air is calm, generally moves the smell away to provide respite from the stink, unlike the hanging, humid blankets of air pervading the South.

Still, the stench of the English wafts through this part of the West, too, being distinctly evident in the Mormons, so much British arrogance in their veins and individual histories they cannot detach from that island no matter how hard they try. They have the added burden of being, in their minds, a chosen people, and every Mormon settler, no matter how destitute, considers himself above those who haven't swallowed Joseph Smith's malarkey. When I took on the job as the Fort Hall Reservation's Indian Agent a decade ago, only a few English remnants of the Hudson's Bay stained the area, but with the spread of the saints comes the stench of the English, that odor light in nature if compared to the South's but still, at moments, overtaking the local aromas.

The cattle companies, too, having just arrived in the last five years, reek of the English. A California consortium brought cattle from Texas before the Reservation was established, true, but the government kicked them out to make a Reservation free of contentious white men. Since then, it's mostly Britishers from London and Scotland who bring their lordly ways, ready to create their kingdoms in the way little men do. Careful to distinguish themselves from Mormons, they share all their traits save a coarseness absent in their religious counterparts.

When the pluff sends its message out another sort of season is in play. Summer's warmth is coming and winter's mountain snow runoff is ending. The combination provides a setting for mosquitoes, which lay their eggs in the dissipating puddles of murky water. As James McTucker, the Reservation's cattle overseer, a once religious Quaker less religious now, says, 'if we were the praying sort we might pray for dry winters, even though that'd be against our best interests.' Success of such prayer would mean a lack of grazing, poor crops and starving cows, though it is true that the mosquito hordes would halve in number without high water runoffs.

Our unprayed prayers unanswered, this year the mosquitoes force us to move the Indian cattle herd of some four hundred head to the hills, for the beeves withstand the mosquito swarms no better than men do and will spend the day either running wildly or standing in water up to their necks, anything to avoid getting bitten.

If the head count is off after moving the herd up to the hills, I have to head back down to the bottoms with McTucker to look for strays we missed. I get a full taste of nature then and nature gets a full taste of me, for despite taking care to avoid dusk and dawn, when the spinning pillars of mosquitoes line every stream and backwater and often venture beyond, onto the bluffs, I still encounter clouds of the blood suckers. I smear my hands and face with mud but the mud soon dries out, and the mosquitoes drill their way through any cloth on my arms and legs. I have counted over fifty bites on each limb after less than an hour chasing down a couple strays. I don't know how Hokansen, the "wandering digger"—as the Shoshones call him, stands it, but he suffers the pestilential onslaught all summer and has done so at least since I came here nearly a decade ago. Whether his failure to complete his mission of finding robber's loot has driven him mad or the mosquitoes have I don't know, but mad he is.

Complain as I may, I already wax nostalgic about the process of resisting the swarms and moving the cattle, knowing as I do it's my last Reservation season. My brothers and I put claims out where the railroad is going through, so the first depot after leaving tribal land will be through our property at the Blackfoot River's edge, twenty miles northeast of here. Alonzo took a section not far from mine, expecting a town to emerge around the depot and T.T. put a claim in over on the Snake, west of our claims, to sew up the ferry business. The stage will run from the railroad down to Tilden and then out to the mines at Wood River from there, though McTucker knows of a shortcut, which T.T. intends to take advantage of, that will shorten the route by thirty miles. It will run straight west through the lavas, just skirting the Big Southern Butte. There's water there for a stage stop, the only water in twenty miles every direction save in big spring runoff years from the Lost River. On those years you'll also find ponds all over the desert, clear into August. You just have to know where to look.

The surveying crew is still around, setting camp just up from McTucker's homestead, and both cattle herds, the High and Stout's and Burke's, roam the other side of the river to the west of there. They'll be moving northward up to the desert, racing each other for the best grazing spots. No doubt they each have their secret spot. There's a reward out from John Sparks, the big Nevada cowman, for anyone who finds "The Great Pasture" out in the lavas, a ten thousand acre grassland equipped with its own river, or so the Indians and occasional drunkard say, but until that's found it's a matter of letting the herds roam free to eat the winterfat and occasional bunchgrass. It won't hold them but a few weeks—but long enough— before they head further north to the foothills. By then, the grass will be ready, the snow mostly melted there.

With the railroad coming through from Franklin into Blackfoot and to points north, cattle grazing is going to look different. No need for long drives to Cheyenne, just put them on the train. The surveyor is here primarily to ready land for settlers, and those people will provide the usual impediments to grazing, in addition to being entertainment for the more rowdy cowman element. Some of the bottomlands are already claimed under the Desert Act, passed just a couple years now. Potter, a Desert Claimant, has fenced his section, which didn't sit well with High and Stout's cattle operation. Their herd found holes, conveniently cut, in the barbed wire barriers. Potter complained to the authorities but instead of getting support got himself charged with fencing public lands. It was a surprise that shouldn't have been a surprise, given cattle is king and will be for some time yet. Potter ought to know, he has cows, too, but he was straddling two eras just as you might straddle a fence.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston