Encounters in the americ.., p.1
Encounters in the American Mountain West, page 1
Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning: they find private messages, assurances of love and expressions of gratitude dropped for them in every corner.
RL Stevenson
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
1879
To my friends in Utah: Mikel and Janis and George and Rebecca – Saints and Sinners both, are we all.
CONTENTS
The Road to Zion
The Ben Lomond Trail
How I accidentally got in touch with a Mormon mountaineer from Utah. My first trip out there in 1999, lecturing to school and university students, travelling around to Moab in South Utah, and getting hooked.
The Cactus Ed Trail
I delve into the views of, and places in Utah associated with, Edward Abbey (Cactus Ed), author of Desert Solitaire and an early conservationist. Abbey is a huge icon in the US South-West and a hugely interesting man. I also look critically at US ideas of ‘conservation’.
The Mormon Trail
This is an account of the emigration of the Mormons to Utah and a travelogue around some of the main places associated with their history in the state, focussing on the Mormon Heritage Park in central Utah. Whatever one thinks of their religious views, this is a story of epic proportions.
The Brigadoon Trail
This covers the several occasions when I guided Utah students around the Scottish mountains and lectured on the literature of the Highlands, as well as the semi-surreal time I managed a visit from the Ben Lomond High School Pipe Band, Utah, to the World Piping Championships in Glasgow.
The Trail of the Ancient Ones
Utah was the centre of a pre-Columbian civilisation, known as the Anasazi, which disappeared about 1300AD. I give an account of them and the many places in wilderness Utah associated with them, such as Hovenweep. This takes us to New Mexico (Taos) as many believe that the pueblo culture still extant there stems from the Anasazi leaving Utah.
The Cowboy Trail
Utah is classic Cowboy Country – most Westerns were filmed in the state at places like Moab and Kanab. This trail takes us into Butch Cassidy territory and across the border into Arizona (Tombstone) with its designer cowboys and then to Wyoming with its real and rather frightening Brokeback Mountain versions.
The Indian Trail
Hundreds of years after the Anasazi moved out, the Native Americans, Ute and Navajo, moved in. Their history and topographical sites such as Monument Valley are explored and I look into the dreadful treatment they received at the hands of the white man. On to New Mexico and Canyon de Chelly – and Kit Carson.
The Hanksville Trail
A journey through Mormon Hicksvilles, the isolated backwoods of the state, off the tourist trail – although I do visit Zion National Park. I also visit Mountain Meadows, the scene in 1857 of the infamous massacre of migrants by Mormon vigilantes.
The Trail of the Mountain Men
The Mormons drove out the white men and the trappers when they arrived in Utah in the 1840s to create their religious Utopia. I look at the history of the Mountain Men and climb some of the mountains they explored.
The Miners’ Trail
Conservative Utah has a very radical history it hardly acknowledges – that of the struggles of the miners of the region for unionisation and democratic rights, which led to the judicial execution of Joe Hill in Salt Lake City in 1915. I visit Carbon County and other mining areas well off the tourist trail. I venture into Arizona to explore similar areas.
The Angels’ Trail?
A final thought and some encouragement to go forth …
Maps
States of the American Mountain West
The Ben Lomond Trail
The Cactus Ed Trail
The Mormon Trail
The Brigadoon Trail
The Trail of the Ancient Ones
The Cowboy Trail
The Indian Trail
The Hanksville Trail
The Trail of the Mountain Men
The Miners’ Trail
Photographs
Copyright Page
THE ROAD TO ZION
In 1999 my entire mental frame of reference to Utah was contained within the lines from a song in one of Bob Dylan’s underrated albums, Planet Waves.
Build me a house in Utah
Marry me a wife catch rainbow trout
Have a couple of kids call me pa
That must be what it’s all about.
I took these lines to be penned ironically since the central thing I knew about Utah was that it was the homeland of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – better known as Mormons – whose world view was far from that of the radical Mr Zimmerman – or from mine. It never occurred to me that I would go to Utah, or ever want to go there. In as far as the Rocky Mountains of the USA attracted me, it was the states of Wyoming and Colorado which I had read about and which exerted a certain magnetism. I knew people who had been to these latter states and who sang the praises of their mountains, and I knew others who as travellers had found much to appreciate in Utah’s neighbouring western states such as New Mexico and Arizona – despite any misgivings they might have about certain aspects of American life.
I knew no one who had been to Utah.
By 2011 I was on my eighth visit to Utah – and to the neighbouring South-Western states – in a decade, and I have little doubt that this established pattern will broadly remain for the rest of my days. It was not that I had become a Latter-Day Saint, in whose eyes (and thankfully, in my own also) I remain an unrepentant atheist Sinner. But I have come to realise that the Mormon bark was much worse than the Mormon bite and that indeed there are some aspects of Mormonism which socially mitigate for me what are otherwise negative characteristics of American life, such as excessive individualism and a predeliction to violence.
But what primarily drew me back to Utah was not just its interesting and in some ways unique history, rather it was the impact of the scenery of the lands its Mormon settlers had originally called Deseret. And in this respect, though I did appreciate its mountainous north, it was the spectacular scenery if the state’s desert south that overwhelmed me. It was and remains, the most dramatic landscape I have ever encountered. And again, no one I knew had seen this landscape, or even knew about it. Yes, they had been to Arizona’s Grand Canyon, but not the to-me-more varied landscape of Canyonlands in Utah further up the Colorado River. They had visited or seen films on Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, but had never heard of Zion National Park in Utah. Utah was the black hole in the centre of the cluster of mountain states which surrounded it, from Arizona to Colorado to Wyoming to Nevada. In his book Mormon Country written in the 1940s Wallace Stegner remarked on this invisibility of Utah on any traveller’s radar and called it, ‘The Last of the Sticks’. Though somewhat diluted by time there are some ways in which this description still applies to Utah.
I have no intention of becoming a Latter-Day Saint, nor of, in the words of Dylan, building a house in Utah and marrying me a wife (or two) there, but the trail which led me to Utah was all the more valuable as it was unexpected, and it took me out of my comfort zones, physical and mental. The attraction it has established will, I doubt not, never leave me, and in the historical travelogue which follows, I hope to convey some of what I have discovered and experienced there, which has made Utah of enduring value. The book takes the form of a series of thematic trails in and around the US South-West, specifically in Utah, and it is structured round the unique landscape and history of the region. Some of the trails intersect and overlap, as trails in any landscape do.
Writing a book has many purposes for its writer, and one of the purposes of this book is to persuade its readers to visit Utah. They will not find it a culinary paradise, nor will they encounter a cultural cornucopia, but they will discover a fascinating history stretching from the Anasazi pueblo dwellers through the Mormon settlers to the early struggles of the American labour movement set in what I hold to be some of the most spectacular scenery anywhere on the planet.
Dry lake bed and mountains,
Sagebrush and plateaus stretch
Towards sunrise.
From darkness
Hot sun
Creates long shadows
Makes ground green
Even as it dries.
Mikel Vause
Utah in the Morning
THE BEN LOMOND TRAIL
‘We gotta Ben Lomond in Utah,’ said the guy suddenly standing beside me, ‘I’m gonna get you over there.’ I would like to say he looked like an angel, but rather he bore a passing resemblance to a pugilist. Other Scots than myself had been lured to Utah by angels. Here is the story of one of them from over 150 years ago, summarised by myself from his own account …
As he later told it, he was sitting in Whifflet station, having missed the first train of the day, when the Archangel Gabriel appeared. He was not surprised to see the angel as he had been having visions ever since being recently struck on the head by the cauldron of red hot metal in the ironworks. There was no injury compensation or sickness leave in the Coatbridge ironworks in the 1850s, places described as ‘the worst out of hell’, so he carried on working despite the burns and injuries. The angel (it was still dark and we should remember that even railway porters can seem like angels when we are in crepuscular distress caused by a late train) told him he would receive shelte
He knocked at the house which he later stated the angel had indicated, intending to ask merely for a glass of water and shelter (it was raining a cold drizzle as so often is the case in Lanarkshire) until the next train. When the door opened he found the occupants in a state of turmoil, packing their belongings into wooden kists. Invited in, he sat on one of these while his request for water was attended to by a woman going to the pump outside the house. He watched the family as he drank and asked if they were emigrating as thousands then were. Told yes, he asked, ‘Canada?’ – the main destination at that time.
‘Na, man. Zion, beautiful Deseret, the Earthly Paradise, flowing wi milk and hinney, where you are guaranteed land, and to where the Saints pye your passage. The warld is comin tae an end and Zion alone will be spared. Come wi us! Dinna bide here in slavery and poverty, come tae Zion!’
He left the house, thanking the man and woman for the water, and walked back to the station. As he ascended the steps, Gabriel appeared again and said, ‘Go back, go with them!’ (or maybe the railway porter told him the 7.15 had been delayed as well), so he went back to the house, and instead of asking for another glass of water, he went to Zion.
My own introduction to Zion, to Deseret, or as it was now called, to Utah, had less of a miraculous intervention in its facilitation (unless the Lord is still hiding something from me over a decade later). But I was, like the Coatbridge iron-worker, at a difficult stage in my life. I had just undergone the trauma of a hip replacement operation and was slowly recovering, still using elbow crutches. In addition I had given up my college teaching job of over 20 years duration, to try and make a living working as a full-time writer. This was proving to be a harder and more problematic task than I had thought.
I had worked whilst still teaching, on the manuscript of a book called Scotland’s Mountains before the Mountaineers, a labour of three hard years. Bringing it all together on leaving teaching, I submitted it to my publisher, and, confident in the publication date given by him, had arranged to give the launch of the book with a lecture and slide show, (accompanied by mountain songs provided by my friend Jack Law) at a Mountaineering Literature Festival in Leeds, late in 1998. The date of the festival drew near, but the book failed to appear. Then, shortly before the event came the bad news; the book would not be ready in time – though the publisher could send me copies of the cover to distribute as advertising. A great believer in having to shoot the bear before you can sell the bearskin, I was preparing to cancel my appearance at the festival when my life-partner told me not to be stupid, insisting (as she usually does on any suitable occasion) that I should ‘Go!’. (The angel in disguise?)
Reluctantly I took the advice and headed south with a heavy heart. Despite my pessimism the event went very well – at least if measured by the number of book covers given away, although that may have been an unreliable indicator. The songs were enjoyed as were the images of mountains I showed, including a few of Ben Lomond in the Scottish Highlands. As Jack and I prepared to tidy up after the event a guy approached us. He said, (and I repeat verbatim), ‘We gotta Ben Lomond in Utah. I’m gonna get you guys across to do this show over there.’
We are Scots, Jack and I; cynical, pessimistic, and careful not to raise any hopes that might be dashed. We chatted politely about the possibilities to Mikel Vause, who told us he taught literature, (including, he said, the world’s only course on Mountaineering Literature) at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, and we promised to send him a copy of my book when it finally appeared and expected never to hear from him again. A couple of months later (my book had by then been despatched) I got a phone call which went roughly as follows: ‘Hi, this is Mike Vause. We met in Leeds. You guys get your asses over here and do your show for a Wilderness Conference I am organising at Weber State. We’ll pay your fares and give you accommodation and an honorarium.’ It was more an order than a request, so we did as we were instructed. In February 1999 Jack and I were on a flight to Utah. And that is how it all started.
Ironically the flight, via Amsterdam, took us back over Glasgow in the dark, where I could see the lights of my street, 10 hours after having left the house; we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere – a bit like the ironworker in Whifflet station whose story I retold at the beginning of this chapter. Another dozen hours of boredom were only broken by seeing the coast of Labrador and then Hudson’s Bay in the gathering darkness, a wilderness of ice floes and emptiness. Salt Lake City airport came suddenly in the morning, with the sun beginning to rise behind the snow-clad Wasatch Mountains to the east. And there was our substitute for Archangel Gabriel, the more welcome Mikel, waiting to drive us along the freeway through the built-up urban area north of Salt Lake to Ogden, where we were deposited to catch up on a little sleep – in the Ben Lomond Hotel.
‘You’ve got a Ben Lomond Hotel and well as a Ben Lomond?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Yep, and we gotta a Ben Lomond High School as well,’ came the reply.
Mikel left us to snatch a kip and some late breakfast, saying he’d pick us up for a talk to his literature class in the afternoon. This had not been mentioned in the programming schedule and I asked in mild panic,
‘What about?’
‘Oh, anything you like,’ he said, ‘whatever you talk about you’ll know more about than they will, so it will be fine.’ And with that he left us in our suite of rooms.
The Ben Lomond Hotel was, as such places in the US often are, luxurious but with an additional slight air of vulgarity. It proclaimed itself as ‘An Historic Building’ – it had been built in the 1920s – and in the foyer there was ‘An Historic Exhibition’ of bottles, plates and tin openers from the inter-war period. We had one of those gargantuan American breakfasts where everything initially looks wonderful but whose constituents would be difficult to tell apart in a blind tasting. The waitress approached, friendly but looking slightly frayed at the edges, ‘Where you guys from? Scotland, wow! You gotta lotta castles over there, aint ya? When you guys get back, you be sure and send me a postcard of some castles.’ She was probably amazed when we obliged and had possibly also forgotten who we were by the time she received it.
‘What are we going to do this afternoon with Mike’s students?’ Jack asked, mildly perturbed.
‘Just give them a couple of Rabbie Burns songs – that’s literature – and I’ll show them some slides of Ben Lomond, that should do.’ I replied.
Mike duly arrived and drove us to the university campus on the edge of Ogden, pulling the car over in the biggest car park I had ever been in until I walked a bit further and realised this was the overflow from the main car park. I mentioned this to Mikel and he commented matter-of-factly, ‘No one walks anywhere here. And everyone has a car.’
The talk, which I hurriedly entitled ‘Romanticism and the Scottish Highlands’, went well, to judge by the polite response and the number of books I sold. But here I was to observe a phonemenon for the first time that almost always repeated itself subsequently whenever I gave a talk in those parts – no one asked any questions, or if they did, it was a personal question about myself, or something totally unexpected like, ‘My ancestors were called Black. Where does the Black Clan come from in Scotland?’
I asked Mikel about the lack of questioning and he gave a curious twist to the issue.
‘Well, if they ask a question it implies that you’ve missed something out or got something wrong, and people in Utah are brought up to be polite and not be critical of other people publicly. It’s the Mormon thing.’
My first encounter with a form of behaviour that was initially a welcome contrast to the grumpy critical cynicism we are so used to at home in Britain, but which eventually left me feeling that I was drowning in a syrup of cloying ‘niceness’, and longing for some good old-fashioned bad manners.
We certainly didn’t get any bad manners at Mikel’s home that evening, where we went to see his collection of ‘antique’ ice-axes. I was surprised; they were all more recent than the wooden shafted one I had started mountaineering with in the 1960s, and which Mikel immediately offered me $100 for if I brought it over next time. His wife Janis was the essence of kindness and friendliness, a fine person, and we also met two of his lovely daughters. By now Jack and I were both shattered and we headed back to the hotel for what we hoped would be a good night’s sleep; this ‘Merka’ was hard work.* We were hoping to get a day out walking on the Wasatch Mountains the next day, though Mikel told us nobody walked in winter on these mountains, only skied, because the snow was very dry, soft and difficult to walk in – and there was a high avalanche risk. Nonsense we thought, we are Scots, we eat ice-axes for breakfast, no silly soft snow will stop us.
