An Utter Tragedy.

We will soon be off on a trip along the Oregon Trail through southern Idaho and into western Oregon and Washington. There’s a lot of history along this nineteenth-century superhighway.

Stretched across more than a hundred miles of the road is the history of one of the saddest tales on the emigrant trails—a series of events known by various names, but most often as the Utter-Van Ornum Massacre. As with much of history, there is a lot of confusion surrounding what happened. But here’s the gist of it.

Shoshone Indians attacked an emigrant company of some 44 travelers somewhere west of the present location of Mountain Home, Idaho, and somewhere south of present-day Boise. Several pioneers were killed and after more fighting and needing water, four of the eight wagons were abandoned. The emigrants lost other people in attacks over the next few days as they traveled until the Shoshone departed. With little to eat, the travelers left the remaining wagons and walked to the Owhyhee River, near the deserted Fort Boise. Indians there traded salmon for the remainder of the emigrants’ belongings and guns, then severe hunger set in.

The senior Van Ornum, along with a few surviving members of the Utter family, left the hunger camp and moved on. The move did not save them, but it may have kept them—at least the children—from being eaten. Four dead children were consumed in the camp and there was talk of killing another for food. Instead, the body of a man dead ten days was exhumed, but before he was eaten help arrived and 12 survivors were rescued.

Meanwhile, Indians had attacked and killed the Van Ornum party, except for three girls and a boy who were taken captive. It’s fairly certain the girls were soon killed, and perhaps the boy—but his fate remains a mystery. There were claims and stories of a white boy living with Indians at various places.

Responding to one such story, the boy’s uncle came from Oregon and convinced army troops from Camp Douglas in Utah to rescue the boy from a Shoshone band in Cache Valley. After some shooting, some negotiating, and some double dealing, the boy was taken. Although he had light hair and eyes, his identity was and is suspect. He was about the right age to be the Van Ornum boy, but spoke no English and was Shoshone in all his ways, and fought his “rescuers” to no avail. The Shoshone said he was the son of a French mountain man and a sister of Chief Washakie. A photo memorializes the capture, with the boy in the bottom row, flanked by the army officer who led the expedition and his uncle.

The uncle took him to Oregon, and to California soon after. Then history loses track of the boy, and his fate is unknown.

 

Poet on the Patio.

During rodeo weekend in St. George, Utah, The Book Bungalow will host yours truly as “Poet on the Patio” Saturday, September 14 at 10:00 a.m. Rodeo has been the inspiration for a good many of my poems, ranging from humor to thoughtful to ponderings on how the sport challenges home and married life.

My long-ago rodeo travels did not take me to St. George for the PRCA rodeo—an event that’s still going strong and will be held that weekend. But I did compete in the Dixie College rodeo there a few times as a member of Utah State University Intercollegiate Rodeo Team, and in 1973 won the bareback riding there. I still wear the trophy buckle on occasion, although my belt back then wasn’t as long as it is nowadays. 

If you are anywhere near the bottom corner of Utah that weekend, please drop by the patio out back of The Book Bungalow, located at 94 West Tabernacle Street in St. George, Saturday, September 14 at 10:00 a.m. Bring your friends. Bring your neighbors. Bring a smile (if you don’t bring one, come anyway—we’ll try to send you home with one).

Really Stupid Words, Chapter 23.

And now for something completely different.

This edition of Stupid Words does not involve words at all. It does involve language, but not spoken language. It involves waggling two fingers on each hand in what is known as air quotes.

I guess somebody, somewhere, sometime, decided that waggling fingers like that resembles printed quotation marks. It’s a reach.

It’s a mystery to me why and how it caught on, as the gesture serves no real purpose.

Still, some people feel obligated to waggle, thinking that waggling with their fingers adds emphasis to what they are saying with their mouth. It doesn’t. It’s more a distraction, really. For many, an annoyance.

Besides, the human voice is perfectly suited to add emphasis, no fingers required. There’s volume, there’s inflection, there’s pacing, stretching, stress, intonation, cadence, pitch, timbre, tone, even silent pauses. I’m sure there are other ways to emphasize what you’re saying, but waggling your fingers to make air quotes need not (and, to my way of thinking, should not) be among them.

If ever you are tempted to waggle your fingers when speaking, remember how the late Chris Farley showed how stupid air quotes are with his character Bennett Brauer. You can look it up.

The Parcel Post Bank

In my last post about a then-pending trip to Vernal, Utah, (which turned out a success, I might add) I mentioned a bank there, built from bricks sent through the United States Post Office. That mention merited interest among some readers, so I thought I would expand on it a bit.

Above is a photo I took of the bank (still standing and still a bank) with its brick facade. As you see, they are ordinary looking bricks. But how they got there is anything but ordinary. Here’s the story, as quoted from a sign on the sidewalk across the intersection from the bank. Other sources generally agree with this telling, although you’ll see a huge difference in numbers, and numbers that don’t add up, as you read on.

How Far Would You Carry a Brick for Seven Cents?

The building located diagonally from you . . . [was] originally the Bank of Vernal. Did you know that this building was shipped to Vernal through the US Post Office brick by brick?

All of the decorative brick, 5,000 packages weighing 50 pounds each, were sent from Salt Lake City, Utah, by parcel post because it was half the rate of normal freight.

Salt Lake City is only 3 hours away by automobile. In 1916, it took approximately 4 days to receive a parcel post shipment. The brick first had to travel 309 miles by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway to Mack, Colorado. It was then transferred onto the narrow gauge railroad of the Uintah Railway. From Mack, it climbed 63 miles north, up the steepest railroad grade in North America into the desert mining town of Watson. From here, the brick was loaded onto 17 six-horse wagons for the 2-day and 60-mile ride through Devil’s playground and over the Alhandra River Ferry to Vernal.

Imagine, all of that work for only seven cents postage per brick!

A history of the United States Postal Service adds these details (and discrepancies):

John B. Cahoon of the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company recalled that his company shipped 15,000 bricks to Vernal via Parcel Post. The bricks were individually wrapped in paper and packed ten to a wooden crate to meet the maximum allowable 50-pound limit for packages. In total, the bricks filled 1,500 crates and weighed about 37½ tons.

USPS history also goes beyond the bricks:

The Bank of Vernal’s bricks weren’t the only unusually large shipments received at the [Vernal] Post Office that summer. Cheap postage rates contributed to a construction boom. Many building materials, including cement, plaster, nails, and other hardware, poured into town. Meanwhile, all the merchants in town received merchandise for their stores via Parcel Post. In September 1916, a train carload of twelve tons of canned tomatoes—9,720 cans packed in 486 cases—arrived at the Vernal Post Office for area stores.

There are still plenty of canned tomatoes on grocery store shelves in Vernal, but they did not get there by mail. All those Parcel Post shipments to Vernal prompted changes in postal regulations, and you can’t do that sort of thing anymore.

 

On the Outlaw Trail.

You could stick a pin just about anywhere in a map of Utah and there would be some interesting aspect of Old West history that happened there. The northeastern part of Utah below Wyoming and next to Colorado is no exception. Brown’s Hole (Brown’s Park, if you prefer) and Diamond Mountain are there. And the Outlaw Trail, leading from Hole in the Wall in Wyoming to Robbers Roost in Utah, runs through the Uinta Basin and most every outlaw in the history of the Intermountain West frequented the area.

 Among them was Matt Warner, the bandit who introduced Butch Cassidy to the outlaw life, and subject of my historical novel, OUTLAWMAN: The Life and Times of Matt Warner.

On July 22, I will be in Vernal, the heart of the Uinta Basin, where Matt Warner was arrested for murder following a gunfight where he killed two men and wounded another, speaking at the Uintah County Library. (Uintah and Uinta are both correct spellings, depending on circumstances, but that’s a story for another day.) I’ll be speaking about Warner’s life and times, reading a few selections from the book, and visiting with people about one of the Old West’s most notorious outlaws, who later became a respected lawman.

If you’re anywhere near the area we’d love to see you there. There’s a lot to do and see in the Uinta Basin, including a bank on Vernal’s main street built back around 1916 from 37 tons of bricks—every one of which arrived in town with a postage stamp, via parcel post. That, too, is a story for another day.

It’s a Kick (starter).

A while back, publisher Silverado Press invited me to be part of an anthology of Western stories by some of today’s top authors (and me). It sounded like an interesting project, so I signed on. That’s the cover of the book above.

But there’s something unusual about this book—not so unusual these days, I suppose, but certainly new to me. Readers—potential readers—will fund the publication through something called Kickstarter. I guess how it works is that interested readers buy the book in advance, contributing at various levels of support for added perks and benefits.

As I said, I don’t know the ins-and-outs of how it all works, but here’s a link that should answer all your questions and tell you how to get involved.

Silverado Press Presents Western Stories by Today’s Top Writers.

You’ll see that the editor, Jeff Mariotte, has assembled a stellar cast of Western Writers. And me. Take a look. You might like the idea of helping publish a book.

Reruns.

Not long ago, yours truly appeared on LA Talk Radio in a wide-ranging, penetrating, perceptive, enlightened, astute, scintillating, incisive, informative, in-depth (or so I’m told) interview with Tom Swearingen, guest host for the “Rendezvous with a Writer” program.

Life being what it is, it’s altogether likely that not all of you were able to tune in to the live broadcast.

Not to worry. LA Talk Radio has made the program available all over the place so you can tune in. Being something of a Luddite, I don’t pretend to know what all this stuff is or how it all works, but you (or your grandkids) probably do.

Here are several links you can click on to take you to either an audio only or a video and audio recording of the interview. Thanks for listening. Or watching.

Video:
LA Talk Radio Facebook Page
YouTube

Audio:
LA Talk Radio Audio
Podbean
Spotify
Amazon Music