Tilden

By Ralph Thurston

In Tilden, Mormon polygamists, native Shoshoni and the last of the rangeland herdsmen join immigrants from Japan, Italy, Mexico, Russia, and Germany, all unconsciously trailing in the wake of the Bonneville Flood through nineteenth and twentieth century Idaho. Told through the lives of a speech-impaired WWI veteran and a local farmer a generation younger, Tilden captures how the Carey Act and world affairs catalyzed and transformed southeast Idaho.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665572224

Ralph Thurston

Ralph Thurston lives in Blackfoot, Idaho with his wife, watercolorist Jeriann Sabin, twenty miles from the Tilden area where he was raised in the early 1960s. His other books, mostly nonfiction, include two how-to books on cut flower growing, a trade the couple plied for over two decades, only recently retiring.

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© 2022 Ralph Thurston. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 09/26/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7223-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7222-4 (e)

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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15,000 B.C.E.

Bonneville Lake

Utah, Nevada, Idaho

It takes time.

Four thousand years for the lake to reach a thousand feet deep, to encompass thirty thousand square miles. Three inches a year were the basin a cube instead of an imperfect cone, its level heightening rapidly early in the process and less so later on, even as, lacking an outlet, its volume steadily increases. It covers, eventually, what will someday be mapped as western Utah, southeast Idaho, and northwest Nevada.

Its water, only five percent of it from melting glaciers, collects mostly from multiple watersheds, each releasing its snow every spring, the ice age coolness lessening summer evaporation, thus more coming in than going out. Two alluvial fans form a notch at the head of the Portneuf River in the north, to its east the Portneuf foothill range and to the west the Bannocks. The fans dam the place to be called Red Rock Pass, eight hundred feet wide at its crest, and have done so for millennia.

An earthquake strikes. The dam starts seeping. It breaches, collapses, releasing a four hundred and ten-foot high flood crest through the valley, spilling to one side into the Bear River valley but moving primarily toward the Snake River fifty miles northward. It hits that channel in less than an hour, in another fifteen minutes strikes high, lava founded ground four miles northward, a lava base strong enough to hold at 4450 feet of elevation. But leftward, westward, the channel is free, the basin it has cut for millennia two dozen miles wide. In ten minutes the flood hits a natural lake forty miles long, one backed up by a natural lava dam, which this wave erodes in no time at all, thirty-three million cubic feet a second roaring down the plain at seventy miles per hour, depositing hundreds of square miles of sediment downstream, scouring a six hundred feet deep canyon, creating Shoshone Falls and other falls, enlarging the Bruneau river canyon and Salmon Falls Creek, entering Hells Canyon hundreds of miles later, reaching the Columbia, finding the Pacific Ocean, along the way tumbling boulders until they’re smooth as giant watermelons.

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December 1967

Township 4 South, Range 33 East, Section 29

It’s snowing so my tracks will be covered. Normally not a thief, I’m stealing a two-foot section of Verlyn’s barbed wire fence, a piece of the top strand. Having already cut it out, I just need to tighten the broken strand with the replacement piece I brought with me. I prepared my enterprise earlier by making two eyes, one on each end, of the substitute wire, now I just need to thread the ends of the cut strand into them, pull them tight and wrap them together so they don’t loosen up. Using two pairs of plier handles, inserting one in each looped eye and twisting them opposite directions, I take all the slack from the fix—Verlyn won’t even notice, and if he notices he won’t care.

I doubt the stolen piece is that valuable but it’s rare. I’ve been around the county quite a bit and never seen any wire like it. Instead of a barb every so many inches like all the other wire around, it has rectangular metal plates, roughly an inch by an inch and a half, with a short cut at each corner aiming toward the center. One strand of the braided wire releases from its twist and attaches at two of the long side corners and the other strand does the same on the opposite side, before re-braiding like typical wire does. It runs from here at the road almost to the old house where Thomas Chandler lived, about an eighth of a mile. No farther. And just the one strand.

I can’t come to a barbed wire fence without being reminded of the war. Two jumbled strips of it, usually, many yards apart, meant to deter the enemy but also preventing us from making forays against our foes. On the rare nights we wanted to surprise the Germans we had to take wire cutters with us, there wasn’t enough light to see our way through without severing the strands. And then we just hoped the enemy didn’t hear our approach as we hurled grenades then ran back through the holes in the fence. We took turns mending the gap on our return, that vulnerable job often a fatal one.

Sometimes a German, sometimes one of ours, would get caught in the wire and get shot, hang their and die, stay as a corpse for days. Once, I couldn’t take watching the man squirm in the dusk, dark enough I couldn’t tell if the puppet on the wire was ours or theirs. I shot him, put him on the other side, the non-suffering side, he was straddling this one and that one long enough. Our lives were going on and another one wasn’t.

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1884

Township 4 South, Range 33 East, Section 32

All we got is time, Roughy. Settle down. Bilious’ voice, suited for his foreman’s position, part authority and part balm, forces a wake in the conversation. He’s the only one laying down and ready to make it a night, the other four—younger, greener, experienced at working cattle but not practiced at waiting for others—stumbling about, fidgeting with knives and pacing, or lost in thought.

Still, the cattle seem restless, Roughy finally says, It’d be nice to know when Burke’s comin’.

Hi Cherry, torpid until that moment, can’t resist a poke. You want they should telegraph ahead?

The Burke outfit bought the High and Stout herd months back, has since been coming from Oregon’s Jordan Valley and heading east to pick up purchased cattle, including theirs, on the way. The H and S crew, not knowing where the herds are coming from, are holding theirs in wait, their responsibility ending when the two herds merge.

What’s Hi for again, Hi? Dip teases, sensing an opening.

We’ve been through this before.

High falutin’, says Johnny Hutch, grinning at the promising banter.

High and mighty, says Dip. That’s my wager.

Bilious, despite himself, can’t resist. Hymie.

There is laughter. He does look a little Jewish, Dip says.

I’m guessin’ Hyrum. Hutch tosses a weed into the fire. Hyrum, when did your folks get tired of two syllables and start calling you Hi?

It’s from working for High and Stout.

Good thing you didn’t work for the Warbonnet. You’d’ve been War. Or Bonnet. He pauses. Actually, Bonnet fits you fine.

Johnny Reed’s exerted diplomacy emanates for a moment. We just like hearin’ you talk, Hi. Relax. He pauses. Now if we could just figure out the Cherry part.

Hi picks up a pebble and tosses it at Johnny’s boots, striking a rowel. You don’t bother Bilious askin’ ’bout his name.

That’s ’cause we all heard the five William story before. Bill, Will, William, Billiam and Bilious. All workin’ for the Warbonnet Londoners at the same time. Bilious just came in last, though he did grow into the name.

When have you seen a Jew, by the way? Hi asks.

Dip ponders for a bit. I seen a picture last time I was in Cheyenne. Curly sideburns, kinda like you got, Hi. His hat not that much different ’n yours, shorter brim and taller is all.

Speaking of Cheyenne, Roughy interjects. Which way are those cows going?

Toward it.

Better question is which way are they comin’, Dip says. Other side or this side of the river?"

The grassy side. Hutch smirks.

North or South. Hunt or Stuart. Bilious’ voice rings hard.

Meaning?

The Astor Expedition in 1811, that’s Hunt, they took the North side of the river and the Astor Party, Stuart version, took the South, this side. Through what’s Fort Hall now. Hunt’s missed it.

What would be the point of Burke going up the other side?

They wouldn’t have to cross the reservation.

Maybe they’re going to just put ’em on the train.

If the train had cattle cars, they could. They don’t. Not in Blackfoot, anyways.

Well why not.

Too many cows. Add it up. Our three thousand head. Coumerilh’s 1500. Garletz has his here plus those over in Alturas County. Plus what they’re bringing up from Winnemucca and picked up over in Jordan Valley.

You forgot Twin Falls.

You get the point.

Seems like Jordan Valley’s a long way around. Weren’t you on one of those drives, Dip?

Once. Enough. We went that way because Mormon country is too full of the buttermilks. Too many fences, not proper fences, the farms look like pasture to cows and the farmers don’t seem to appreciate it.

It’s not like it was. Won’t be like it is. Bilious shifts his hat to cover his eyes, wishes he had another to cover his ears. Settlers or sheepmen, one way or the other, it’s not going to be no more cattle drives for long. He sighs deeply. Let’s get some sleep now goddammit. Long day tomorrow.

They’re all long, for Chrissakes, says Roughy.

Bilious’ order does not abate the conversation. Johnny Hutch asks, Reckon we’ll see Mr. McTucker?

He might show up at the Rez, just for watchin’, Dip says. I think he’s got a taste of city life. I believe he’s school superintendent. We may not see him at all, but then again a man gets a taste for cows he generally can’t entirely leave it alone.

I heard he was a Quaker.

A Quaker with a gun.

He carries a gun?

Well, I hope so.

I thought Quakers were peace loving.

He is, he’s single. If he was married he couldn’t be a Quaker.

Bilious steps in, growls, Go to sleep, ’fore I use my gun on you.

There is a lull, a near-silence broken by frogs, crickets, the shuffling of three thousand head of cattle stirring in the night. Chewing. Shitting. Pissing. Roughy just can’t let it be. I still don’t get why you went north from Winnemucca instead of East, he says. There has to be a way over that’s quicker.

Quick’s got nothing to do with it. Dip’s tone is edging toward annoyance, but he continues. Oregon cattle used to go to Winnemucca and from there to California. Railroad came in then, though, and suddenly the East wanted Western beef so we started driving them that way. Through the Camas, mostly, pasturing along the way. Starting in April. Some of them still go to Yellowstone to feed up there. It all changes. Prices. Bad winter. Railroad.

Sounds like gambling.

It’s all just gambling. We’re just the chips. Dip’s petulance has reached the level of disgust.

Guess I’m not paid to think, Roughy says apologetically.

A good thing.

Amens around, Bilious mutters.

That what you think, Bilious? About the trains?

He heaves a thick sigh, thinks for a moment. ’82 when I worked the War Bonnet we shipped out 3000 at Soda, first year of the railroad. A hunnerd forty cars. I suppose the last real big drive was the year before. Even cowboys get favorably used to not worrying about stampedes and help and weather. These were gettin’ now’ll be going on the railroad, if not in Blackfoot or Soda for sure in Cheyenne. Probably Soda, but I ain’t guessin’. We’re just supposed to connect with Burke’s and when they take possession we’re done.

Moses to the mountain or the mountain to Moses, sounds like.

Such a philosophizer.

Yessir, times are changin’."

They’d all played roulette in Reno, all seen the ball rolling in its circles, losing steam after a few rounds then dropping down, bouncing out, dropping in, bouncing again until it settled. They settle.

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Barbed wire was somewhat simultaneously and

independently invented in France and the United States

in the mid 1860’s. Smooth wire had been in use as a

fencing material, but the single strand type sagged when it

was hot, broke when very cold and didn’t dissuade cattle

from rubbing against or running through it. By adding

a metal thorn placed perpendicular into two braided

wires, temperatures affected the fencing less and gave cattle

an extra thing to think about—as well as being more

visible. Early barbs were more vicious and substantial

than later ones, sometimes badly hurting animals. The

smaller, modern barbs, to an incisive animal, actually

became a place to scratch itches, the evidence seen in

collections of hair left in the rubbing action of cow on wire.

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December 1967

Township 4 South, Range 33 East, Section 29

Unless… The word spills out, following the earlier They’re… …not... …biting…. It takes time, it always does, the listener and the world and even my mind moving at different speeds than my speech. Verlyn and his boy don’t know I’m as distracted as they are. I give respect to my words as they do but like them wish I would hurry up.

Thirty years of doctor visits and they decide I have bradylalia. Also known as bradyphasia. Fancy words for slow speech. As opposed to its opposite, tachylalia, fast speech—a deluge of words. Flip a coin, choose which is more annoying, that inundating flood or the drip, drip trickle of Chinese torture. Flip another coin, choose the most annoying between talking and listening to it.

…you have… No doubt freezing cold, David fidgets in the wind. Verlyn, doing his best, feigns attention, might still regret a moment thirty years ago when he took his friends’ dare to see if he could tie his shoes before I got the next word out. I’d just gotten back from the war to end all wars, and already knew that my war would never end.

…worms. I take the worms, wriggling in a can of moist soil, from the pickup’s passenger floor, offer them to Verlyn but he demurs, says he has to get David back to the house to get warm. An excuse, I know. And he knows I know. Conversational strata, one layer of sediment on another.

I’m practiced enough to not protest, don’t start another sentence or I’ll have to finish it and he won’t leave until I do. I just nod, watch David rush to jump into the green Dodge pickup, a ’63 I believe, ten years newer than my ’53 Ford, his with a bed more suitably sized for a farmer. They drive north, past the eighty acres he bought from DeLos Wells, who bought it from his uncle Charles who got it from his brother Lawrence. Wells is an old polygamist name, I know, but then anyone associated with Mormons before the century’s turn has some sort of tie to the practice.

Lawrence got the parcel from Jesse Shelman who picked it up in a bureaucratic array I’ve not sorted out, something to do with tax delinquency in which John Anderson, the County, and Bruce Parmelee all quitclaimed to him.

The piece had been broken in two from Thomas Chandler’s original 1909 Carey Act patent, son Walter buying back the farmland on the north, taken for unpaid taxes in ’30, from the county for eighty dollars in ’38. The other piece is Parmelee and Houghland’s and reaches from Verlyn’s south fence past here, McTucker Springs, over the bluff and beyond to the Snake River. These things stick in my mind. I was a surveyor in the war, I remember directions, distance and shape, as a consequence I have a sticky mind that won’t let go of unnecessary facts.

When you can’t speak you can listen. If something’s not always coming out of you things can go in. I am not the center of attention, ever, and though I avoid society in general, from the periphery even in this extremely rural locale I hear what people wouldn’t say around anyone they knew. And from that distance I see things, too, look at things a little differently as any surveyor does. Just ask Everest or Lambdon, the surveyors whose sixty miles-a-side triangulations crisscrossed India longitudinally, thereby giving Britain its conceptual authority to conquer a continent. Bingham County may not be quite so dramatically blessed as the Himalayas, but we have the Big Southern Butte at 7550 feet, Ferry Butte at 4842, and closer, Belville’s corner at 4445, a spot four miles away and fifty feet higher than here—one of significance to early surveyors and also of interest to me.

My attention may be better than others’, then, as a result of one cylinder, speech, not firing, and I read plenty, courtesy of Mrs. Wiebe at the Aberdeen library. I look across McTucker, know who it was named after—James McTucker, who came here in the 1860’s, was the Shoshones’ first cattle boss foreman after the Reservation was established in ’63. I know that James Shirley, after driving a herd of longhorns from Texas to Fort Hall—that’s fifteen hundred miles, a long ways, but not as long a drive as Jack Dalton’s intended push of 260 cattle from Challis to Dawson, Alaska in 1898—and pasturing them for years there, was either forced off the Reservation or lured by the exchange of six sections to the west at Raft River. I’m a wealth of information, as an old nemesis, Porter Cheney, used to say derogatorily, not knowing just how right he was and that I was getting the last laugh.

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The corner posts require the fencer’s most technical skill. Master them and consider yourself a fencebuilders’ guild member. If two fences meet at a ninety-degree angle, a large-diameter post goes at the corner, another post a few feet in on each fenceline, a cross post of smaller diameter, nailed at the top wire’s height between each set of posts to form an H. This foundation keeps the fence from losing tautness. A section of wire then gets looped diagonally around each post duo, at ground level on the corner post and at cross post height on the other. Staple the wire to prevent slippage. You then place a stick or other tool midway between the two wires (the looped section doubles, going around one side of the posts and coming back on the other), under one strand and above the other, with which to tighten them. Used thusly as a lever, a few twists certify that the posts’ destinies will be entwined rather than separating, thus giving the entire fence its sturdiness.

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Some people no doubt think me stupid. There’s still a few, those who knew me before the war and then knew me after and couldn’t connect the two pieces, who think I’m being obstinate. Faking my affliction, seeking pity with an elaborate joke. Being rude, standoffish, like I didn’t want to be normal like them. The doctors were like that early on. It’s all in your mind, they said. Shellshock, they called it, you’ll get over it with time. The British shot some soldiers for desertion when the war hit them like it did me. It might have been for the best had the American policy been the same.

I light a cigarette, Verlyn’s pickup is heading east, homeward. Smoke and breath turning to fog in the cold air makes an interesting cloudlike display. I can watch each exhalation move over McTucker. As a kid I played with Thomas Chandler’s kids, ultimately there were seventeen but just three or four when I was that age, just over the hill where the cabin was. You can still find the foundation but the cabin itself was moved up behind me, to the hill a half-mile away, before electricity hit the country. Tom thought when the dam was built in ’25 that the resultant reservoir would drown his property. It made it within a mile. If he had asked me, a surveyor, I could have told him the probable outcome, though moving the cabin might be easier and faster than listening to me explain why not to.

Typically, bradylalia entails some sort of brain injury. My head wasn’t smashed up though I was struck there in my last skirmish with the Germans. I can still feel the knot on my skull when I put my hat on. I fared better physically than my battalions mate Pete Shelman, who I signed up with in Blackfoot in ’17. He took a bullet near the spine that bothered him whenever