On the Back Roads (20 page)

This was Saturday. In spite of the midsummer heat, Brant was out there in the sun, spatula in hand, watching cheese melt over buffalo. The aroma caught me as I left Charlie Scott's place.

Inside the store, Brant's spouse Tiffey tended the cash register and their two children, who were in a playpen. An enormous buffalo head hung on the back wall. Like the meat on the grill, the head came from Colorado. It carried a price of $1,200.

Rounding out the Yellow Pages of Leeds, if there are any, is Lisa's Corner Salon and a tidy RV park run by two hard-working ladies originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico. An art gallery is located in a house built by proprietor Joanne Thornton's great-grandfather. Add the U.S. Post Office, and that's it.

Leeds is a one-street town of trees and century-old homes, a few newer. Its ancestry is tied to nearby Silver Reef and Harrisburg. Both became ghost towns about the same time, but for different reasons. Their remains are now carefully preserved. Harrisburg is even fenced off and labeled. A new generation is moving in around them, bringing rock gardens, swimming pools, and the hum of air-conditioners.

A
nearby newcomer, Interstate 15, runs through Utah from top to bottom. Its predecessor, Highway 91, passes through Leeds and goes on south three miles through the crumbling stone remains of Harrisburg. An RV resort has taken hold there. Respectful of their pioneer predecessors, developers have preserved the stone buildings of Harrisburg. Its old cemetery is restored, fenced in, and built around.

Harrisburg was never large nor prosperous. It peaked in 1868 with twenty-five families. Rocky ground gave them good material for building houses, but it was not much good for growing crops. Floods were all too common, as were swarms of grasshoppers. By the turn of the century, everybody had left.

Although Harrisburg did not last, a remarkable story that originated here is still alive. Every story out of the Old West seems to start with a freezing wind howling down the canyons. And that's how it was one winter night when an old silver prospect or stopped for shelter at a farmhouse in Harrisburg. Invited in, a roaring fire drew him close to the sandstone fireplace. There he noticed drops of shining metal oozing
from the rock. A closer look and he knew just what the metal was. Silver!

A ridge of rusty sandstone runs west of Harrisburg to the horizon. I assume the prospector got a fix on that ridge as the place where the fireplace builder got his rock. The fact that silver was there at all, geologists say, is a freak of nature. Silver in sandstone exists in only one other place in the world: Mannheim, Germany.

The facts of the 1868 silver discovery may be debatable, but the results are not. It changed lives, reshaped history, and created a town five miles north of Harrisburg called Silver Reef. By 1878, Silver Reef was the biggest town in southern Utah, with a population exceeding 1,500. The miners were largely Irish Catholics who poured into Silver Reef from mining towns in Nevada.

A curious situation developed in Silver Reef. An island of Catholics and some Protestants lived in a sea of Mormon pioneers and their descendants. The two groups got along in spite of significant differences in ideology and lifestyle. Together they made history when the Catholics celebrated high mass in the Mormon tabernacle in nearby St. George. Even the thirty-member Mormon choir participated, having practiced for two weeks from a single copy of music provided by the Catholic priest. On May 25, 1879, a congregation of 3,000 gathered in the tabernacle. Curious, respectful Mormons outnumbered the Catholics more than two to one.

After a few million dollars in silver were dug from the hills, and After a few shootings, lynchings, and hangings, the miners disappeared from Silver Reef as quickly as they had come. Stone walls and wood scaffolding, capsizing into the canyons, are all that remain, except for the bank and the Wells Fargo Express office. Said to be the only one remaining outside California, the Wells Fargo office is restored and is now a museum and gallery.

Comfortably plugged in at Harrisburg for the night, Rusty and I sat on the grass and watched rain clouds gather around the 10,000-foot peaks of the Pine Valley Mountains. Soft piano, as only Floyd Cramer could play it, drifted from the motor
home next door. The sun set and took with it the rust from the ridge of sandstone. It was a magnificent sight, just as it was a century ago.

Out there now is the interstate, which at twilight adds a contemporary magnificence of its own. Most people would not call it that, but it's a sight to be had only in America. Huge trailer trucks that yesterday may have been in a sandstorm in New Mexico or a downpour in Washington now roll through a sunset here in south-central Utah. Their drivers are just now turning on the lights that outline their huge rigs, adding to the visual awe of those mammoths of the American road.

T
he next day, I followed Interstate 15 south a few miles to St. George, where the moving vans from Mayflower and United Van Lines run a constant shuttle service from southern California. This is just one popular destination on the flight-from-California list of the fed-up-and-over-fifty crowd.

The popular magazines that compile annual hit parades of cities of this country always rate St. George among the ten or twenty “best places to retire.” Combine that with economics, and folks in Los Angeles do the logical thing. They sell their grossly appreciated homes there and recreate them here for half the price.

“Dixie Country,” as this area of Utah is called, currently has about 4 percent of the state's population but 10 percent of it is golf courses. There are no significant employers here, so wages are low. But the newcomers are not looking for jobs. The numbers most important to them are the crime rate, which is low, the current interest rate, and their tee times.

Dixie's year-round golf courses, spreading around red cliffs and lava-capped ridges, are all within a fifteen-minute drive of each other. And a golfer can play eighteen holes here
in the Afternoon, having spent the morning snow skiing at Brian Head or Elk Meadows.

Dixie got its nickname from its early settlers. Mormon pioneers came here in the winter of 1861, as directed by Brigham Young. Leaving their comfortable farms and homes in northern Utah, 309 families colonized this beautiful, albeit dusty, alkali flat. Many chosen for the task originally hailed from farms in Tennessee and Mississippi. And with good reason. Their mission was to raise cotton. The Civil War, just a few months old, had cut off sources of cotton to the North. Young's intention was to create a new supply. Their efforts met with only moderate success. With the end of the war and the railroad extending into Utah, cotton again became plentiful. The attempt to grow it here in Dixie ended. But the name stuck.

Brigham Young, the second president of the Mormon Church, was Dixie's first snowbird, at least the first prominent one. This was his winter retreat from Salt Lake City. His white-picket-fenced house gets top billing on the local tourist tour along with the Mormon temple, which ranks with the Eiffel Tower or the Hollywood sign as a dominant landmark.

Sun-seeking northerners, golf bags in tow, flock here in big numbers to spend the winter. Even more briefly stop for a round of golf and then continue south into Arizona, where winter temperatures are warmer.

Eons before the first pioneers wandered this land, water and wind worked wonders. Alternating between inland seas and Sahara-like deserts, the elements created a great plateau of sands tone and limes tone deposits thousands of feet thick. Over time, these gigantic sheets of rock buckled, folded, and uplifted. Massive sections were exposed to the forces of erosion, which sculpted the land into spectacular shapes and colors.

Utah's southern half has the most abundant and varied natural beauty of perhaps any state in the union. Until recent road improvements, it was the most remote region of the Lower Forty-eight.

I skirted St. George and headed north on Highway 18. About ten minutes After leaving the interstate, Rusty began racing around in the motor home. She hopped on the couch and looked out the window for a few seconds. Then she hit the floor and disappeared somewhere in the back. A few seconds later, she reappeared and then did it all over again. This burst of energy had some unknown meaning, so I elected not to ignore it. I pulled off a road leading to Snow Canyon State Park.

Had it not been for Rusty's racing, I never would never have seen this multicolored geological wonder. This canyon is a jumble of red-and-white Navajo sands tone with black lava flows pouring over its jagged cliffs. Greenery appears in the cracks and crevasses, softening the ruggedness of the canyon. Fine sand, the color and feel of ground paprika, supports hundreds of desert plants. The prevalent sagebrush has silver leaves as narrow as thread.

We wandered and explored. So beautiful, so close to the city, yet we saw few people. This must be paradise for a city dog like Rusty. It sure was for me.

A
handbill stuck on the front of the Pine Valley General Store announced a rodeo tomorrow in Enterprise. “Get off the mountain and back on the highway. Head north a few miles. You'll see it.” In the store, a man standing with one leg and a crutch sketched the whereabouts of Enterprise, using his thumb as a pointer.

“Much of a rodeo?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah! Kids hereabouts are into rodeoing before they're into school. That one's an amateur rodeo, mostly local cowboys and youngsters. They got the same craziness as the pros, though, just no big pot to win.” I felt a quick look-over. “And where might you be from?”

“On the coast, I guess. Utah is new to me.”

“Then I'll bet ya don't know tomorrow here's a holiday, July 24. They always celebrate it in fine fashion down in Enterprise.” He pointed his thumb again. “On the way, ya ought to stop at Mountain Meadows. That's where they had the big massacre, don't ya know?”

I told him I didn't know but certainly would stop.

Leaving a pleasantly cool elevation of 7,000 feet, my motor home practically coasted out of the Pine Valley Mountains.
I had second thoughts of forsaking brook fishing in an alpine campground for a hot, dusty, amateur rodeo.

Back on Highway 18 again, I remembered what he said about a massacre and wondered why I should know about it. So when the Mountain Meadows sign appeared, I pulled off onto a blacktop parking lot overlooking a tranquil, green valley that stretched for miles. I walked to an overlook. There stood a monument to the dead.

It happened in Sept ember 1857. Fifty-plus pioneer families from Arkansas were massacred in broad daylight. Only seventeen individuals, all children, survived. Mormon militiamen were the primary culprits. There are many accounts as to the reason of the mass ac re. The entire truth will probably never be known, because most of the documents and diaries of the participants were destroyed.

Al though there were many investigations, no punishment was handed out for the crime until twenty years later. A Mormon elder, John Doyle Lee, who was almost like a son to Brigham Young, was returned to the site in 1877 and executed for leading the massacre.

The surviving children, ranging in age from nine months to six years, were taken into Mormon homes. But in September of 1859 Captain James Lynch, of the U.S. Army, took custody of all the children and returned them to their relatives in Arkansas.

There may have been an eighteenth child, a girl, who survived. It is not known what became of her. Some say she was later killed for talking too much. Others say that she was adopted by a childless Mormon family and lived out her life in Utah.

Although mass acres are not uncommon in the history of the American West, what happened here almost a century and a half later definitely is. Descendants of both the perpetrators and the victims gathered here in September 1990 to bury their suspicions and anger. They dedicated the monument, a wall of Arkansas granite inscribed with the eighty-two known names of those who died at Mountain Meadows. The ages of the
children, some as young as seven, are also etched in the white stone.

The memorial is located on a rise, where markers point out the route and campsite of the pioneers. It lies hidden from the highway. Were I not looking for it, I probably would not have stopped. I am glad to have seen this beautiful meadow with its remarkable memorial to tragedy, repentance, and forgiveness.

I think this place has human meaning that goes far beyond the picket-fenced residence in St. George or the monolithic temple there. Granted, I do not have the perspective of a Mormon. Yet, the initial and subsequent events that occurred here to me represent humanity at its very worst
and
its very best.

It takes no particular insight to understand why I find no reference to this historic spot in any of the local guides given to visitors to Utah. Maybe time will change that.

T
he tidy lawn of the town square is rimmed by huge shade trees, which were probably here in 1902 when this town was founded. I parked beneath one. Three stone buildings—all Mormon churches, each larger than the other—trace the growth of Enterprise.

I soon discovered that I was camped about dead center of a celebration that was to go on all the next day and into the night. July 24, 1847, is the day the Mormons arrived in Utah's Salt Lake Valley. Known as Pioneer Day, July 24 is now a state holiday. It is celebrated in Utah like none other.

It began at sunrise. A flatbed truck, with two loud speakers mounted on the cab, pulled up and parked ahead of me. Then, one by one, came the members of the Enterprise String Band. They climbed up a stepladder onto the truck bed and took seats down each side.