December 1, 2023
1466 Words
Chapter One – Huntsville, Utah Territory, Forty miles NE of Salt Lake City, May, 1892
The piercing cry of the Spruce Hawk rang out in the humid morning air over the mountain slopes on the east side of the Wasatch Ridge in the Uintah Mountains. James Moyes had already been up and at work for several hours, stripping bark from cut white pine logs using a sharp bill hook. Pulling off his leather hat, he wiped the sweat from his brow with his rough, denim sleeve. He could taste the salt from the sweat on his lips. Jim knew that the local natives revered the Spruce Hawks. The Uintah Indians had taught that these hawks were a messenger from the divine, telling their people to be vigilant, look at all the facts, and use inherited wisdom to figure out what the universe was trying to say. In his Mormon culture, he knew the elders would say to listen to the promptings of the holy spirit. So far, the spirit hadn’t chosen to tell Jim much about the current situation.
Right now, Jim was just trying to figure out what was going on in the mind of his elder brother, William.
Jim didn’t know if anything had ever been more confusing or harder to understand than what William had told him just that morning. Jim had lived nearly thirty years. He had traveled from Glasgow to Utah as a mere child. Now married to Elizabeth for more than five years, they had shared the devastating loss to illness of their first two children. He’s seen much that was hard and confusing, but Jim could make some sort of sense of all that. But this? This new idea of Bill’s just didn’t seem to make any sense at all! Bill and Jim shared middle names, Gowans, from their mother’s family name, but it was becoming apparent to Jim that name may be all they shared. That and sore backs and blistered hands from working timber six days a week.
Across the small, newly cleared space of the forest floor, Bill put down his axe. Pulling off his own, sweaty hat, he crossed the fresh clearing, skirting downed and stripped pine logs. Later, he and Jim would bring the oxen up from their place near Huntsville and drag the huge logs, one at a time, down the mountain to Bill’s water-powered sawmill, on the banks of Wolf Creek.
After a long drink from their shared canvas water bag, Bill called to Jim, “These are good logs, Jim, but it’s a long way to drag ‘em down to the mill from here. If we were stayin’ in Utah we’d have to move even further up toward Ben Lomond to find decent-sized stands. I’m glad we’re leavin’ for Mexico!”
There it was. Bill’s hairbrained idea.
“Aw, Bill, listen for once. That’s plum crazy! We can’t just up and move to Mexico, lock, stock, and barrel. Cogitate on this, man! You’ve got a wife and four young ‘uns. You got a 10-year lease with harvest rights on this stand of mountain timber and a fine working sawmill here. Our old man and Uncle Robert run the biggest lumber yard in northern Utah, sellin’ your planks for hard cash as fast as we can rip ‘em from the pine logs and your eight oxen can haul ‘em down the canyon to Ogden. Talk about crazy! Who’s Pa gonna buy his lumber from if not us? I know you’re my elder brother and my boss and all, and I mean no disrespect, but man, if I’ve ever seen crazy, this is it! What do you know about Mexico, anyway? What’s there that’s better than what you got here?”
“And, Bill, you know us leavin’ will break Ma’s heart!”
“Jim, Jim, Jim. Don’t be tryin’ to talk me out of it. And don’t be gettin’ all emotional. I am pretty well set on this. You remember Brother Charles Holm? He was with us on the train from New York to Wyoming and then in the Mumford Wagon Company from Wyoming to the Salt Lake Valley way back in ’68, one of our messmates. Why, he’s one of the finest men I’ve ever known. Remember? He was a bit older than us, but he pitched in and helped Ma and Pa and us boys, even pushin’ the wagon when we got bogged down in the mud up in Parley’s Canyon.”
“Yeah, be that as it may, I remember him. I thought he was a LOT older than us—wasn’t he Danish or some such? Never mind that. What’s old Charles got to do with this?”
“Well, Jim, he just came back from Mexico. I ran into him down at the Tabernacle in Ogden last Sunday. He says there are the most beautiful, green stands of tall, straight pines you’ve ever seen up in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico above Colonia Diaz. All the new Mormon settlers there are strugglin’ to build homes and barns ‘cause they got no way but hand rip-saws to turn logs into lumber. Why, he reckons’ they’ll pay two- or three-times Ogden’s goin’ rate, for good lumber. The Governor of Chihuahua has already said he’d issue a timber harvest license to anyone who could handle the business. We can do it! Why, I tell you, this could be our gold mine!”
“Yeah. You mean YOUR gold mine! That all sounds good, Bill, but we ain’t seen it with our own eyes! You can be so bull-headed! Once you get an idea in that head of yours…”
“Brother Holm ain’t gonna lie to me, Jim. He’s an honorable man of rectitude.”
“Even so, Bill, how you gonna get us there with a sawmill and everything we need to live and work?”
“Jim, I don’t got to tell you, it’s 1892 now. There’s the iron horse and rail lines. We don’t have to depend on mules and wooden-wheel wagons like back in the day with Mumford and Company. Business has been good. I’ve been saving. I’ve got some cash, and I can sell this timber lease for good money. There’s a D&RG/W train line that runs from Ogden down through the Arizona and New Mexico territories, then meets up with the Ferro Carril Mexicano and runs right to Los Trios, and that’s less than 50 miles from Colonia Diaz. Shoot, a train runnin’ full steam can get there in just a few days! We can hire a mule train from there to take the mill up into the mountains.”
“What? You gonna hire the whole train?”
“As much as I got to, Jim, to get the mill, our livestock and tools, me and Sarah and the kids, you and Lizzy down there. I figure one flat car and one box car will do—the mill ain’t so big once we take it apart. We can ride in the boxcar with the livestock. We don’t need no first-class passage. Remember steerage on the leaky old Emerald Isle from Liverpool? We survived that, didn’t we? And we were just kids, then. Ma even gave birth to our little sister, Elizabeth, may she rest in peace, in that steerage. We’ve come a long way from Glasgow for a couple Sawneys. This is a short move compared to what we’ve already done. I’ve checked the cost with the rail agent—I can pay. ‘Course, I admit that’s one way. We get there, we got to work hard, ‘cause there won’t be ‘nuff money left to bring us back. It may be a tight scratch. I ain’t worried, though. I hear nothing but good things about life in Colonia Diaz. Some good families have settled there, and we know some of them, like the Taylors and the Romneys. And if we need a little help for a few days, the Saints there will pitch in to sustain us—they need us. They can’t get on with the Lord’s work pretty well if they gotta live in dugouts and can’t build homes. Why, with this fine mill in operation, a state timber harvest license, good, strong oxen to haul the lumber down to the town, and our strong backs, what could be easier? We can hire a couple locals as cheap labor. We’ll be in tall clover!”
“Oh, Bill! Why get into a scrape? What does Sarah think of this plan? You just got your place in Huntsville to feel like home, and my cabin’s okay, Lizzy likes it, for aught I know. I’m happy here.”
Laying his right hand gently on Jim’s left shoulder, Bill says, “Be that as it may. Sarah will do as she’s told. Let’s pray about it, Jim. But I think we both know the answer.”
And so began the journey of William Gowans Moyes, my grandfather, and his family into the frontier of Mexico.
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