Where Trails Run Out

By Anna Prince Redd

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Chapter 11

Synopsis: A company of twenty-four young men and two families — James L. Davis, his wife, Mary, and their four children; Henry H. Harriman, his wife, Elizabeth, and their five children — are called to explore a route from Cedar City, in Southern Utah, to San Juan County. The two families are to remain in San Juan and prepare for the coming of the main company.

The company, after much suffering, finally reaches Moenkopi. The Davis family remains there and the others go on toward the San Juan. Scouts return to Moenkopi and report the arrival of the Harrimans on the San Juan.

The James L. Davis family and the scouts leave to join the Harrimans, and Mary and Elizabeth are reunited. Mary’s baby is born after a difficult confinement. The families at Montezuma are destitute for food and there is much trouble with unfriendly Indians. One of the Harriman children dies; George Hobbs arrives with word that the main company will soon join the pioneers on the San Juan.

James and Henry Harriman were at work on the river dam, when a friendly Indian runner came dashing across the ford and up the bank, waving his arms and shouting: “Many white men and their squaws have come! On the banks of the San Juan, they sit down. Heap tired. Horses no pull. All the time the white men sit down!” “It is the second company!” James and Henry cried in unison. And away they raced to James’ house, where Mary and Elizabeth were.

“They’ve come, girls!” they cried. “Our friends have got through at last!”

“God be praised!” Elizabeth exclaimed.

Mary had not taken her eyes from James’ face. He began to shift uncomfortably, and avoided her eyes.

“Why don’t we go to meet them, James?” she asked, knowing from his nervous shiftings that something was wrong.

“We can’t go to meet them Mary,” Henry replied, relieving James of the responsibility of answering. “They are miles down the river. This good Lamanite brought us word.”

The women sat down, suddenly, too disappointed for speech.

The Indian stepped forward and began to explain as fluently as he could: “Two suns, and white men come here. River place no big! Some move wagons. Some stay!”

Relief and joy were unmistakable in everyone’s face. The Indian smiled proudly. Turning to James and Henry, he asked: “You squaws heap glad! Like um more folks to come here, huh?”

“White men bring us food,” said James.

“Long time, no eat,” Henry added for good measure.

The Indian shook his head negatively. “Long time, no eat?” he questioned. “White men on river want food, too!”

Not grasping the full import of the Indian’s words, Henry explained patiently, “Long time, no eat. Two moons, only little bit bread. White men come. White men bring food to Montezuma.”

Again the Indian shook his head. “No savvy,” he said. “Heap no savvy! Maybe so paper talk tell about food.”

From a pouch that hung from his waist, the Indian extracted a crumpled bit of paper.

“A letter!” Elizabeth exclaimed. And then in a voice that was mixed with eagerness and dread, she asked James to read the letter. Mary just stood still and listened.

James smoothed out the bit of wrapping paper, and read aloud:

Bluff, Utah
San Juan County,
April 1st, 1880

Elder James L. Davis
Montezuma Settlement,
San Juan Mission, San Juan

Dear Brother Davis:

This is to inform you that this day the San Juan Mission Company reached the San Juan, and, unable to continue on up the river to your location, have designated a town site here, and we have named it “Bluff City.” We are very worn out, and our food supply is low. But we are instructed to send a generous portion of what we have to you, at the outpost of this mission.

We, therefore, have dispatched this food supply to you, by those of the company, who, having drawn blank slips in the land lottery here, will go on to Montezuma Settlement and live near you.

May God bless and prosper you in your faithful labors.

Your brother in the Gospel,
Platt De Alton Lyman,
First Counselor to Silas S. Smith
President of the San Juan Mission

There was a profound silence during the reading of the letter and for some minutes afterward. Then everyone began to talk at once.

“Isn’t it wonderful!” Elizabeth cried. “I can hardly believe that we shall see our friends so soon. People from our very own homes!”

“We can hold Church and have a real school!” Mary exclaimed. “There’ll be other women like ourselves,” she added. “Neighbors and friends!” And for sheer joy she began to weep.

James Davis executed a dance step, and swung Henry Harriman around the room with him. “There’ll be people to buy things, Henry,” he contributed. “Now I can have my long-dreamed-of store!”

They stopped dancing, and James blew his nose vigorously.

“We’ll have a post office, and get the news,” Henry said, as though he could not believe his own words. “It’s really so.”

James grabbed the ladies’ hands, and they caught hold of Henry, and away they circled, too happy to wonder why they were frightening their children so. Wide-eyed, the children watched their parents, too dazed by the sudden excitement to show any feelings at all.

In the midst of this rejoicing, Ted Davis came racing into the yard. “Pa!” he cried. “Pa! The milk cows are gone!”

James Davis whirled toward his son, consternation and disbelief written in his face.

“Ted, my boy,” he said thickly, “don’t joke with your Pa. Not at a time like this!”

“I’m not joking, Pa!” Ted cried. “Come and see for yourself!”

Walking like an old man, tired of his years, James Davis followed his son to the enclosure where the last of his cows had been guarded. Waiting for them to calve, promising the little ones plenty of good milk to drink, had been all that had kept the family from complete discouragement. Now, even that hope was gone!

“I’ll follow the Indians, Pa!” Ted cried. “It’s my fault that the cows are gone. I went to set my coyote traps and the Indians came.”

“You have done the same before, my boy Ted, and the cows were safe. You couldn’t stay by the enclosure all the time, there was other work to do.”

‘Til find our cows, Pa. I’ve got to find ’em— for Ma and little Ethel.”

“It’s too risky, Son. Your life is more to us than a herd of cows!”

“But little Ethel’s got to have milk, Pa!” Ted insisted. “I got to go, Pa.”

James turned back to the house. “We’ll let your mother say, Ted. I think you best not go.”

“Ma, I’m goin’ after the cows!” Ted cried. “Say that I should, Ma.”

James looked at Mary, sitting apathetically before the fire, her hands locked in her lap.

“What do you say, Mary?” he asked. “He may fall into the hands of the Indians.”

“He has to go.” Mary’s eyes were anguished, her voice was unnaturally tense.

“I’ll be careful, Ma,” Ted promised. “I think I know right where to look for the cows.”

“You be home by tomorrow at noon,” Mary said sharply. “Cows or no cows!”

James followed his son into the yard, saw him mount his pony and ride away. “May the Lord protect my boy,” he prayed.

Night came down, quietly as dew falling, and the stars came out, shining like tinsel. Mary stood in the open doorway, numb to the April air, breathing each breath as a painful duty.

James came in from the woodpile with his arms piled up with pitch faggots.

“We’ll not need to make a light down the path, James,” Mary said. “Our Ted will not come tonight.”

She closed the door and went to sit before the fire to knit and wait. Wait and knit! She counted the coyotes by their yelping, the hours by the beat of her heart.

Morning came. Its clear, thin light dimmed the fire embers and rested on James’ features as they sagged in sleep. Mary’s eyes ranged over the distant hills. She watched the shadows until they climbed to the summits. She awakened James and the children and gave them a small portion of bran, browned and made into broth.

“I hoped there would be clouds,” she said to James. “An Indian could spot Ted for miles away, in this clear light. God might have helped us with some clouds.”

James gasped. Never had Mary spoken like that before. He could not reproach her nor comfort her. He could only wait.

Mary marked the sun’s height. She saw it go higher and higher, until for one suspended instant it centered the sky. Then it moved lower and lower toward the west.

At two o’clock James came back from working on the river dam. “I’ll go hunt for our boy Ted,” he announced. “I must go.”

Mary said, “Yes, James. But you won’t find him.”

James answered wearily: “Try to believe, Mary. You have always had faith. Try to exercise it now.”

“You had better go, James.” Mary got up and went to the door to look out. “Go, James! Go now, or I’ll start screaming and never stop!”

James stood helplessly. “I can’t leave you like this, Mary,” he said. “I just can’t.”

Emily took her father by the hand and led him to the door. “Mind Mama,” she said imperatively. “Mama knows what is best. She has to have Ted.”

James left on foot, not stopping to look back. After a long walk, he climbed to the top of a peak and looked in every direction. But it was such broken up country that he could not see far ahead. At a loss which way to go, he stood still and tried to think. Almost as if it were a voice, the thought came to him: The Lord knows where your boy is, ask him.

Feeling very unworthy, James began to pray. He asked the Lord to overlook his human weaknesses. He reminded the Lord that he had given the work of his hands and the love of his heart to the furtherance of the Church. He asked the Lord to help him now.

He arose and looked out over the country again, and, on a hill three miles away, he saw Ted, as plain as life, riding his horse, with his gun against his shoulder. With a joy that could only be expressed in tears, James turned home. Ted was alive! He had not found the cows, but that did not matter. His boy Ted was safe!

When the hills were too steep for upright locomotion, James slid or rolled down them. Mary was waiting for him at the ford.

“I saw Ted!” James cried. “He is safe!”

Mary looked at him skeptically. “If you saw him, why didn’t you bring him home to me?” she asked sharply.

“He will be home in about an hour,” James assured her. “I tell you, I saw him.”

“You are quite sure?” Mary asked.

“I saw him as plainly as I see you, Mary,” James repeated, “but he did not have the cows.”

Mary began to laugh— shrill, high laughter that sent the blood in purple waves to her face.

“You saw him! You saw him!” she screamed. “Yet it is dark and he is not here!”

“Mary, stop it!” James commanded. “Stop laughing or I’ll throw you in that water there. As I stand here, I tell you I saw my boy Ted! Something has happened to him since then.”

Mary began to cry, pitifully, like a little girl. James took her in his arms, comforting her awkwardly, praying for wisdom.

It came to him, then, that he had asked the Lord to show him whether his son were alive or dead. Saying that Ted would be home in an hour, was anxious presumption. He would take Mary to the house, and, dark as it was, he would go out to look for Ted.

He had gone only a few yards from the house, when he heard the whinny of a horse. It was Stag, Ted’s pony. Straining his eyes to see past the barrier of darkness, the father waited, counting the lagging steps of the horse, dreading to see that it was riderless.

“Pa!” Ted’s voice rang in the darkness. “Pa! Is that you standing there? Or an Indian?”

“It’s Pa, Edward!” James called back. “Thanks be to the Lord, you’ve come.”

Ted slid from his pony and embraced his father. “I— I— didn’t find the cows, Pa,” he choked.

“I know, Edward, but we’ll manage somehow. You run to the house to your mother. I’ll take care of Stag.”

“But Pa, I was miles away from that peak at the time you say you saw me!” Ted’s voice was grave and positive.

James and his son were finishing a new log building which was to be a store and post office for the new Montezuma settlement, a straggling line of twenty families, strung up and down the San Juan river.

“I know the peak you mean, Pa,” Ted said, “and I wouldn’t a rode Stag on it, even if I could have. It would have been too easy for Indians to spot me. No horse could get a footing on that peak, anyway, Pa.” He waited for an answer, but James Davis just pounded away at the board he was nailing. There was a set line to his jaw that kept Ted from arguing the point. Instead he went on casually, “I rode the bottom lands, out of sight.”

After a little while, James said: “I’ve been back to that peak since, Edward, and I couldn’t climb it on foot.”

“Then how do you make out that you saw me, Pa?” Ted stopped his work and looked earnestly at his father.

“I don’t know, and I don’t try to explain it, Edward. I just accept it as the testimony it is.”

“I guess you’re right, Pa.”

They worked in silence for a while, and then Ted asked diffidently, “Why don’t you call me your boy Ted any more, Pa?”

“I can’t, Edward. Since that night your rightful name has seemed good to me.”

“I guess I grew up that night, Pa.”

“It seems so, Edward. It seems so.”

* * * *

Mary and Elizabeth often talked of their experiences. Though many new families had moved from Bluff to the Montezuma, the homesteads were too far apart for daily intercourse, and the original families were still left to their own resources.

“Do you think you will ever like this place, Elizabeth?” Mary asked one afternoon, as she and her friend picked bullberries from the long, thorny branches of the bullberry trees that grew like a thicket along the river land.

“I don’t know, Mary. I’m still frightened of the river. If the trouble with the Indians ever ceases, I might be able to like it here a little better. But we wouldn’t dare be this far from our houses, if we weren’t in plain sight of your husband and Ted at work there on the water wheel. But I hated the river the minute I looked at it. I guess I always will.”

“Well, at least we have food, now, Elizabeth. And we are doing pretty well financially,” Mary said.

“Yes, we have food,” Elizabeth replied sadly. “And the more we have, the more I think of how our children cried for even a little dry crumb of bread.”

“It’s good to have a branch of the Church here, to celebrate the holidays, and visit with friends and neighbors,” Mary reminded Elizabeth. “I try to forget those bitter first years.”

“ill never forget them,” Elizabeth answered. “Nor the trip to San Juan, either.”

Elizabeth lowered her voice confidentially, and, leaving her bucket of berries hanging on a limb, she went over to Mary.

“There is something I’ve wanted to tell you for years, Mary,” she confided. “It seems so foolish to be remembering it all this time, but I just have to tell it to someone.”

Mary looked at her friend in surprise. “Why, Elizabeth!” she exclaimed. “We’ve had so many lonely hours in which to talk, that I didn’t dream you had a secret.”

“It’s not, exactly,” Elizabeth laughed. “It’s just an experience that keeps me guessing.”

She told Mary about the strange Indian who had frightened her so that night on the desert when they had first begun the trip to San Juan.

Mary looked at Elizabeth speculatively. “And all these years you’ve been expecting to see him again?” she asked.

“That’s exactly it. I feel sort of foolish, waiting for him, trying to see him in every unusual Indian that comes to the settlement,” Elizabeth answered.

“Did you ever find out who, or what, made that strange, long call that night, just before you discovered Lost Spring, that wonderful spiritual experience that you had, Elizabeth?”

“Why, no, Mary. I’d sort of forgotten about that.”

“Ill bet it had something to do with your Indian friend,” Mary surmised, thinking of her own Indian friend, Jim Joe, who had led James and her out of Pearcon’s country. “I’ve always had the feeling that the mysterious ‘human spirit’ the Indians whisper about is none other than Jim Joe, the best friend a white man has in this reservation.”

“I wonder,” Elizabeth mused. “Describe Jim Joe to me, Mary.”

“In looks, he’s not much different from any other manly Indian,” Mary replied, “but his bearing is that of a proud, freeborn citizen of America, and of any land, for that matter. He is tall, straightforward and fearless— and, well, sort of mysterious.”

“But you know at once that he is a friend?” Elizabeth queried.

“Yes. That is the most unusual thing about Jim Joe.” Mary looked at Elizabeth speculatively. “You are expecting to hear from him, or see him, soon, aren’t you Elizabeth?”

“Yes. There is trouble brewing with the Indians. We might need such a friend as Jim Joe before we get through with the next few months. Word has just come that a tribesman has been killed by the whites, and the Indians are seeking revenge. The Indians who told Henry about it were excited, and afraid of being seen by their own tribesmen, but they took the risk and came to warn us. They are gathering near the Mitchell ranch!”

Mary looked nervously toward the Mitchell place. “I guess we have enough berries,” she suggested. “Let’s go home, Elizabeth.”

That night, James Davis closed his store early. “This is the first place the Indians will come,” he thought, as he locked the door. he stood with the key half-turned in the lock, thinking. Then he re-entered the store, took up the gun he always kept loaded beneath the counter, threw the lever, and put the cartridges in his pocket.

“Now, I wonder why I did that,” he mused aloud, as he walked to his house. “I better not let anyone know I did it.”

The Indians came, and were angry that the store was closed up. James tried to talk to them, but they were too excited to be reasoned with. Thinking that he would be as wise as he could, James told Ted to open the store and give them what they wanted. By doing so, he hoped to keep them from stealing or destroying everything he had.

Ted was unwilling to do as his father said, and when the Indians got impudent and quarrelsome, he kept answering them back.

“Don’t talk so, Edward,” James commanded sternly. “You are inciting the Indians to do almost anything.”

But Ted was too angry himself to be reasoned with.

“You are sick!” Ted cried to a big Indian that took hold of him. “You are heap sick!”

The Indian drew back in fear. ‘Mormons talk to great Spirit!” he cried, “make Indians sick!” And he drew his gun on Ted.

James jumped in front of him and made Ted open the store door. As it swung open, Ted jumped for the needle gun, but it was gone, for james had put it away when he unloaded it.

The Indians held back. They knew that James worked for the Government. They understood about the post office and knew that if they killed james or his boy, the soldiers would come after them. They talked excitedly, pointing to Ted, who, now that the gun was gone, stood defiantly watching them.

James began to talk to them in a friendly, reasonable tone, and invited them to come into his house and eat. They complied, but their anger still smoldered, and, shortly after leaving the Davis house, they ambushed a cowboy and a Government scout. There was little security for anyone for some time after that.

One night, Mary, alone at home, suddenly slipped outside and returned with twenty warriors t her heels. She had heard their approach, and, though she was expecting a baby very soon, she had walked down a long, dark bowery to meet them.

“Why you no scared?” the chief asked Mary when they got into the house. “Indians heap mad!”

“Indians return good for good,” Mary answered fearlessly.

The answer pleased the Indians. They shook hands with Mary, told her to keep her family inside their own fence for safety, and departed, as quietly as they had come.

(To be continued)