He turned to Sarah. “We think you and Billy Joe ought to start down pretty soon. The canyon’s starting to get choked with dust, and with every wagon going down, the footing gets a little rougher.”
“Okay.”
He turned to Molly. “Are you sure you still want to ride down?”
She suppressed a little shudder. “No. I hate the thought of walking down something that steep, but after watching Ben Perkins go down, I think I’d rather walk.”
“Good. I feel better about that.” He turned. “All right, Patrick, you and Abby mount up and we’ll take them up to the chaining area.” Then to the others, “We’ll see you at the bottom.”
“When you come back, can you help Belle, too?” Sarah asked. She turned and pointed to where they could barely see the top of a wagon cover behind a large outcropping of rock.
“Stanford’s wife?” David asked in surprise. “I thought I saw him go down earlier.”
“He did,” Abby explained, “but not with his family. He told Belle he had been asked to assist the first wagons going down, then to work at the ferry site with Brother Hall. Someone promised to bring her down if he would do that, but no one’s come yet. They asked her to pull out of line and wait over there.”
“She’s trying to be brave,” Molly came in, “but she’s quite worried.”
“Okay. I’ll watch for Stanford and see if I can find out what’s going on. If I don’t find him, we’ll take her down with us when I come back.”
“Thank you,” Abby said. “I’ll run and tell her.”
A few minutes later, it was their turn. They pulled both wagons up the road to the brink of the pitch, then dismounted and helped the teams of men rough-lock their wheels and attach the holding rope. Not ropes, David thought with dismay. Rope. John had only eight men to help him, David had ten, so one rope each was all they needed. So many of the men had gone down with the other wagons and hadn’t had a chance to straggle back up to the top yet.
Satisfied that the chains were in place, David conferred briefly with his father, reminding him to give David a three- or four-minute head start before starting down. Sarah, Molly, and Billy Joe had already begun walking down and were no longer in sight. Patrick wanted Abby to drive with David in the first wagon. He would come with John in the second.
Father and son shook hands quickly, and David climbed up onto the lead wagon seat. Abby sat white-faced, her feet already braced against the front of the wagon box. “You ready?” he asked.
“Never,” she said through clenched teeth. Her eyes were wide, the pupils contracted into pinpoints. Her lower lip was trembling, and her fingers, clinging to the iron rail behind the wagon seat, were like claws, the knuckles white.
David suddenly felt sick. The image of a young girl dangling upside down from a tree house, one foot caught in the loop of a rope ladder, had flashed into his mind. “Oh, Abby,” he breathed. “I forgot about your fear of heights.”
“So get me down from here,” she hissed. “And make it fast.”
“Got it,” he said. He turned. “All right,” he called to the men behind. “Here we go.”
The mules brayed in protest and began to fight the instant David tried to get them to move, but the company had learned something in the last couple of hours. If the men behind pushed the wagon forward, it impelled the animals over the crest, and they had no choice but to go forward. And that was what happened now. Braying raucously, fighting against the pressure from behind, the mules planted their hooves, only to have them slide forward across the rocks. Then the rear wheels went over the crest, and they were committed.
Abby felt a sickening lurch in her stomach as she was suddenly looking almost straight down over the backs of the mules. She was standing nearly straight up, her feet actually braced against the front of the wagon box rather than the floor, her hands clutching the back of the wagon seat to keep herself from hurtling forward.
The air was filled with terrible noises—the screech of iron across rock; the terrified snorting of the mules; the crash of the wagon wheels. But Abby barely heard them. She was conscious of one thing and one thing only—her fingertips digging into the wood, fighting not to let go and fall.
David was standing now too, leaning back at almost a forty-five degree angle to compensate for the downward pitch. He was yelling and hollering as he whipped the reins to keep the mules from slowing down and being run over by the wagon.
Abby gasped. The narrow cleft at the base of the incline was rushing up at them with incredible speed. If they didn’t hit that opening exactly right, they would smash a wheel against the side of the cliff, or maybe even dash one of the mules to death.
Then, just as quickly as it had started, it ended. They hit the soft dirt at the bottom of the ramp and the wagon ground to a halt, dragging the mules to a stop as well.
David sat there for a moment, gasping for breath. The mules were shaking violently. Abby was trembling like she had just awakened from some fiendish nightmare. She didn’t look at him. She sank slowly back to her seat, then shoved her hands beneath her hips so that David wouldn’t see how badly they were shaking.
One of the men from behind ran around to David. “Everything all right?” he said between great gulps of air. David looked at Abby, who managed a nod.
“Okay,” the man said. “You’ve got to keep moving. Your father’s waiting to follow.”
David leaned out and looked back up the steep roadway. Two figures were there by the wagon. Seeing David, both Patrick and John waved back.
The rest of the way down was a blur in Abby’s mind. They passed through the cut, so narrow that from time to time the hubs of the wheels scored into the stone on either side. Here, as above, each successive wagon had pushed the fill dirt down the canyon or thrown it to off one side, leaving the road very uneven. They bounced and swayed from side to side, still dropping at a stomach-twisting, thirty-five-degree angle. Abby would gasp with each new jarring blow or sudden drop until she started to feel light-headed and realized she was hyperventilating.
About halfway down they stopped and let the men helping them down untie the holding rope and start back up the hill. The rest of the way wasn’t quite as bad, but even here, she cursed herself for not riding in the back of the wagon with her eyes tightly closed.
David pulled the wagon to a stop just before they reached Uncle Ben’s Dugway. They sat there for a moment, not believing that they had done it. Up ahead of them, another wagon had just cleared the dugway and was turning onto the track that led down through the foothills to the riverbank. He took a deep breath, looked at her out of the corner of his eye, then stood up. “I’ve got to take the chains off the wheels before we can cross the dugway.”
Not waiting for an answer, he jumped down and went around to the back of the wagon. A few moments later she came around and dropped to her knees beside him, helping him work the chain loose from between the spokes.
They finished without either of them speaking. David gathered the chain into loops and put it into the back of the wagon. Then he turned. “Abby, I think you should go on down with me to the bottom and wait there for your mom and the others.”
“What if you don’t make it back up?”
“I will. I won’t put you through that again.”
She gave a quick, almost desperate shake of her head. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought.”
He shot her an incredulous look.
“It was ten times worse.” Then she managed a wan but impish smile. “And now that I’ve done it once, I can really enjoy it the second time.”
He laughed aloud, the sound bouncing off the cliffs behind them. David started to turn away, then swung back around. He stepped to her, took her by the shoulders, and pulled her to him. She stiffened in surprise as he bent down and kissed her very gently on the lips. “Abby, you are something else,” he said gruffly.
Almost as stunned as she was, he let her go, face turning scarlet. He almost tripped on the loose rocks in his haste t
o put some space between them. Then he turned and plunged away. A moment later he was up on the wagon seat again and urging the mules forward, leaving Abby to stare after him, not sure what had just happened.
Notes
^1. As Miller notes, several men claimed that they were the ones to take the first wagon down, but most of these claims were made much later, or else were reported by their families much later. Miller concludes that while Ben Perkins’s wagon was the first down, he asked Kumen Jones, son-in-law to Jens Nielson, to drive it for him (see Miller, Hole, 109–10).
^2. In his description of this day, Kumen Jones states that he did drive the wagon for Ben Perkins but that he took his team, which was “well broken” (ibid., 110, 184). George Decker, who was fifteen at the time, remembers the Perkins teams balking at the sight of that thousand-foot drop, and he is the one who says that Joseph Barton offered his team of blind horses (cited in ibid., 201). He, however, seems to indicate that it was then Barton who drove the first two wagons down. I have combined these two accounts into what I hope is a plausible way of explaining the differences in them.
^w.There were two ways to lock the rear wheels of a wagon when going down a steep incline. In cross-locking, the two rear wheels were prevented from turning by placing a sturdy post between the spokes of both wheels, or using a chain to lock each wheel individually to stop them from turning. Rough-locking was developed by freighters and teamsters over the years to handle the worst possible grades with full loads. In this case, short lengths of heavy logging chains were wrapped around the tire and felloe where the wheel made contact with the ground. (The felloe is the inside of the circular rim of the wheel where the spokes are attached.) The chains were then attached to heavy brackets attached to the wagon box. This locked the wheels so that the chains, rather than the tires, made contact with the ground. This provided much better braking than a cross-lock (see Miller, Hole, 110).
Chapter 62
Monday, January 26, 1880
“There he is.” David’s father was pointing. “Over there by the ferry.”
Then David saw him. “I’ll be right back.” He broke away and trotted over to where four men were loading a wagon onto the ferry. One of them was Stanford Smith. “Hey, Stanford,” David called, waving.
The man straightened, then recognized David and waved. “Hello, David. You’re down, eh?”
Stanford Smith was tall and thin, with brown hair and bright blue eyes. Though slender, he was muscular and his belly was hard and flat. He had been the foreman on the road crew that worked on the middle stretch of the Hole. He had a reputation for being able to outwork men younger and more powerfully built than he was. He was nearly thirty, and although David hadn’t known him and his wife well in Cedar City, they had met in church several times. But in the last months, they had become good friends.
“Only my dad and I came down,” David explained. “We’re going back up for Patrick and Abby as soon as we get our wagons across. All the fill dirt has been pushed off that first pitch and it’s pretty scary now.”
Stanford frowned. “That’s what I heard.”
“Your wife’s not down yet, I understand.”
His brow wrinkled as he quickly looked around at the numerous wagons waiting for the ferry. Then he lifted his eyes to the notch that soared majestically upward as far as the eye could follow it. “No, not yet.”
“When I left, Sarah told me that Belle had her wagon pulled off to one side waiting for you to come up and get her.”
He muttered something under his breath, then snatched his hat off his head and threw it on the ground in disgust. “I knew it. They promised me that if I would help down below, they’d make sure to bring my wife down. I’ve been getting worried about her.”
“That’s all I need to know,” David said. “Once we get the wagons across, we’ll go back up and bring Belle and the kids down too if you’d like.”
His relief was evident. “That would be deeply appreciated,” he said. “She’s got the three little ones up there with her, you know. And right now, they need me badly on the ferry.”
“I know,” David said. “We’ll get them.”
Stanford swung around and started waving his hands at the wagon that was approaching the ramp. “Hold it right there,” he called. “We have a bit of an emergency.” Then he turned to David. “Have your dad bring his wagon on this one. Then you’ll be first to load when they return. That lets you get back up the mountain as soon as you can.”
Ferry work was maddeningly slow. The one Charles Hall had built here was big enough to carry two wagons and their teams and a few extra people to boot. It had two long oars, one on each side, and crossed the river on its own power rather than being towed through a series of rope pulleys. That meant it had to cross at an angle, landing downstream a couple of hundred yards farther beyond where it started. Then it was towed by a team of horses upstream again until it was well above its initial starting point.
It was almost half an hour before the ferry finally came back and nosed into the riverbank with a solid thud. Charles Hall and one of his sons tossed ropes to those who had waded out to help bring the ferry in. They pulled it up against the bank, the ramp was quickly dropped, and Stanford signaled for David to pull his wagon onboard.
David was already in the wagon seat and clucked to the teams. They had agreed that his father would not come back over on this trip, but would stay on the south side of the river and find someone to watch their teams so they could go back up to the Hole.
The wagon behind him held part of the Barney family, a family with a large number of children who had joined them at Panguitch. Dan Barney’s wagon, which was pulled by a yoke of oxen, was boarded without any problems, though the oxen seemed somewhat nervous about being on the water. But to David’s surprise, instead of raising the ramp and getting under way, the men then loaded five steers on as well. There wasn’t much room behind the wagon, so some of the cattle came up alongside Barney’s wagon.
In a few minutes, everything was on board. The ramp was raised and poles were used to push the ferry back out into the current. Using the two long oars, Hall brought the front end around until they were headed downstream.
David made sure his mules were secure. As he finished, Brother Barney came up to join him. “Any problems coming down?” David asked.
Barney chuckled. “You mean, other than turning our hair white?”
“You too, eh?” Then he looked around. “Your son driving the second wagon?”
“Yes. Buren’s got Sister Barney and the younger children with him. I’ve got the—” The bawling of a cow cut him off. There was a crack of horns clashing against horns; then something thudded heavily against the decking.
Both men turned. One of Barney’s oxen, more nervous now than before, was swinging its massive head back and forth, and that was crowding one of the steers back against the railing. The steer bellowed and kicked back sharply, catching the cow behind it on the foreleg. It reared, trying to get back.
“Uh-oh,” Barney said. The railings on the ferry were two-by-fours nailed to the hull, and were not designed to resist the weight of a steer. Just then, Barney’s boy came around from behind the wagon to see what was going on. “Alfred,” Barney yelled. “Get them cattle back away from the oxen.”
The flat-bottomed boat was now entering the main current and starting to pick up speed, which made the oxen even more nervous. Now both of them were rocking back and forth, lowing mournfully. Alfred, or Al, as everyone called him, was fourteen or fifteen. As he started forward, he saw that he couldn’t get through to the lead steer, so he darted back around and came up the other side, then tried to push his way past the oxen. He was a strapping boy and unafraid. He pushed in, grabbing at the horns of the one ox to try to settle it down.
David leaped forward. If Al could contain the oxen, maybe he could push the two steers back out of the way.
Dan Barney had circled around David’s wagon and was coming in behind his son. ?
??Be careful, Al. Don’t let him catch you with those horns.”
David had reached the oxen too, but didn’t dare push past them because the nearest ox was rolling back and forth, eyes wild. “Grab this one, Al,” he shouted. “Let me get by.”
Al did exactly as he was told. He reached in and grabbed the ox nearest to David by the horn and dragged its head toward him. David shot past him and faced the steer. It lowered its head, preparing to charge. “Hey!” David shouted, waving his arms. The steer started backing up, pushing up against the one behind it. It was working. They both started to back up.
Then David heard a shout and jerked around. Al had the ox with both hands, hanging on for dear life. The ox lowered its head, snorting angrily, then hooked up with a powerful thrust of its neck. Al Barney went flying past David. He cleared the rail, then hit the water with a tremendous splash.
“Al!” David spun around. That was a mistake. The front steer charged. One horn snagged David’s pant leg. The animal jerked its head upward, and David felt a searing pain across the back of his leg. He crashed backwards, arms flailing. The last thing David saw was Dan Barney, mouth open, arms waving. Then the railing hit David in the small of his back. He did a graceful end-over-end tumble and hit the ice-cold water headfirst.1
“Something’s happened,” Patrick McKenna said. He was standing at the crest of the cut near the top of the Hole in the Rock. He stared morosely down the chasm, which was now totally deserted as far as he could see down it. He glanced up at the sky. The cloud cover had thickened, but he could tell the sun was now two-thirds of the way down toward the western horizon. “We can’t wait any longer,” he said.
“No, Daddy,” Abby cried, greatly dismayed. “He’ll come. He promised he would.”