Land of the saints, p.1
Land of the Saints, page 1
Land of the Saints
It is the summer of 1859 and the Turner family are making their way along the Oregon Trail to California. The wagon train with which they are travelling is attacked by a band of Paiute, but this is no mere skirmish in the Indian Wars. There are more sinister forces at work. The territory of Utah, or Deseret as those who live there call it, is in open rebellion against the government in Washington. Turner and his wife and daughter are caught in the crossfire of what looks to be shaping up to a regular shooting war.
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Long Shadows
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Land of the Saints
Jay Clanton
ROBERT HALE
© Jay Clanton 2016
First published in Great Britain 2016
ISBN 978-0-7198-2209-4
The Crowood Press
The Stable Block
Crowood Lane
Ramsbury
Marlborough
Wiltshire SN8 2HR
www.bhwesterns.com
Robert Hale is an imprint of The Crowood Press
The right of Jay Clanton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Prologue
The bleak and barren plain stretched away into the distance, unbroken by rivers, trees, mountains or anything else that might have served to vary the monotony of the flat, desolate landscape. The only features of note were the occasional low, scrubby bushes and gleaming white patches of alkaline deposits, which looked a little like miniature snow drifts.
Had there been a watcher in the heart of this dusty and inhospitable wilderness on a certain afternoon in the middle of July, 1848, he would have seen on the distant horizon a faint smudge, like the merest wisp of grey smoke. As the afternoon drew on this tiny cloud grew ever greater, until it took on the appearance of a vast column of dust, rising to the steely sky. It looked for all the world like that pillar of smoke that led the Israelites out of the wilderness and towards their Promised Land.
This would have been an apt enough comparison, for moving across the dreary land was indeed a people in search of a homeland; their oxen and horses kicking up the dry, powdery soil, which rose and hung in the still air above them. They had so far journeyed well over 1,000 miles, from the farmlands of Illinois to the salty deserts of the Utah Territory.
The party crossing the great Alkali Desert on that afternoon was no mere wagon train; this was the exodus of an entire nation, almost 5,000 men, women and children heading west towards only the Lord knew what. As they drew nearer, our watcher would have observed that the line of wagons forging ever onwards was arranged more like a military formation than any ordinary band of migrants. Flankers rode a mile or so out on either side of the column: grim-faced men carrying muskets; they looked as though they were well accustomed to handling them. Although dressed now in civilian clothes, these were members of the Nauvoo Legion, the militia who formerly guarded the homes of those of the Chosen People who lived in Illinois.
The wagons, cattle and horses took some hours to wend their way past any given spot, so enormous was this cavalcade. Seated next to the driver of one wagon was a sober-looking man in his mid forties. He had a lean, pale, ascetic face, in which were set the glittering eyes of a fanatic. Every so often this man, their leader and prophet, would mutter thanks to the Lord whom he served. Sometimes he called aloud with a mighty voice: ‘On, on to Zion!’ Those in neighbouring wagons would take up the cry and from hundreds of throats came the exultant shout of: ‘On to Zion!’.
This day was different though, because the leader of this band of Holy Saints knew without the shadow of a doubt that their journey was almost ended and that they were now within sight of the Promised Land. He and his people had been sorely persecuted by those heathens who surrounded them, but that was all going to change. Soon they would establish a nation under God, where they themselves would rule and those who sneered at or opposed them would be crushed under their very heel. The worm was about to turn: anyone who reviled and despised the Saints would find that, truly, God is not mocked.
Chapter 1
Ten years after Brigham Young had led his Mormons through the wilderness to Zion an ordinary wagon train made its way along the Oregon Trail, from Independence to Fort Vancouver. One of the wagons contained the family of Lee Turner, who had until a few months earlier been a farmer in Iowa. The price of wheat had tumbled, though, in the worst agricultural recession the country had ever seen. Not only that, the farmlands of the Midwest had also been swept by epidemics of malaria and cholera; epidemics so severe that they assumed the proportions of Biblical plagues. Many farmers had, like Lee Turner, thrown in their hands, sold up and were now heading either to the healthier and more fertile countryside of Oregon or further south, to California, that land of opportunity.
It was to Sacramento in California that the Turners were heading. When once they reached Fort Hall some of the wagons would peel off and head through the Utah Territory to California. In the wagon on that August morning was Turner’s wife Harriet, and walking alongside it were his sixteen-year-old son James and James’s sister Margaret, who was two years younger. The youngsters were chatting in a desultory fashion.
‘You think we’ll reach Fort Hall before the week’s out?’ asked Margaret, as bored as she could possibly be by the endless grasslands across which they were crawling.
‘Happen so,’ replied her brother. ‘Pa says that we can rest up there. His sister will put us up for a space. Think on that, sleeping in a proper bed, indoors.’
‘I’m awful bored,’ said the girl. ‘It’s an adventure when you start on something like this, but Lord, three months on the trail is surely enough.’
At this moment his father called James over to the wagon and he left his sister to see why he was wanted.
Despite having two children who were next door to being adults themselves, Lee Turner was not yet thirty-five years of age; he had married exceedingly young, when he was hardly older than James was now. Turner was a shrewd man and somewhat of a deep thinker, notwithstanding the fact that he had received only the most meagre and rudimentary education.
‘Your sister bemoaning her fate again?’ asked Turner of his son.
‘Not overmuch, sir. I guess she’s a little vexed at how long and dull this here journey is becoming.’
‘Well, I can tell you now, we’ll be in Fort Hall before long. I want to talk seriously to you about matters.’ Seeing his son’s worried expression, Turner laughed and added, ‘You’ve no occasion to be uneasy. I ain’t about to rebuke you or nothing of that sort. I meant that I wished to take counsel with you. You’re mighty near to being a man yourself. Time I treated you so.’
James felt himself flushing with pride. It was the first time that his father had ever spoken to him like this. He didn’t realize that his helpfulness and lack of complaints since they had left Independence had been noted with approval by both his parents and that it was these qualities that had prompted his father to say such a thing.
Turner continued: ‘Like as not, you’ve marked that army detachments have passed us, then and when?’
‘Yes sir, I noticed.’
‘I’ve said naught of this, for fear of setting your sister into hysterics or suchlike, but I think you need to know what’s what.’
Margaret was well out of earshot of this conversation, having wandered off to walk alongside another girl of about her age.
Lee Turner continued: ‘Truth is, son, we are like to pass through a region more or less at war.’
James was young enough to feel a thrill of excitement at these words. He managed, though, to maintain what he conceived as being a sober and adult mien, merely saying:
‘War? Who’s at war and how does it concern us?’
‘You ever hear tell of the Saints?’
‘Saints? You mean like they teach us about in Sunday school?’
‘Not hardly,’ said his father. ‘These ‘saints’ are a horse of a different colour. Some know them as Mormons.’
‘Oh, them! Ain’t they the ones as has more than one wife?’
‘You got that right,’ said Turner, ‘although why any man in his right senses would want more than one wife is something of a mystery to me.’
From inside the wagon came the voice of Harriet Turner, who was trying to catch up on a little mending.
‘Don’t be thinking as I can’t hear what you’re a-saying out there, Lee Turner. It sounds a right good scheme to me. Just imagine having all the household tasks shared by another six or seven women, instead of me having to do everything myself. Why, me and the other wives would have more free time than we knew what to do with.’
Lee Turner smiled broadly at this. He said to his son: ‘Jump up here next to me, James. We can talk more conveniently.’
When James was beside him Turner continued: ‘There used to be a whole heap of these Mormons living in Illinois, at a place called Nauvoo. I used to meet them from time to time and they seemed to me to be God-fearing men and women. They wouldn’t touch liquor, which is a sensible dodge.’
‘Now I know what you’re talking of, sir,’ James said. ‘We passed some on the way here as you said was Mormons. They was pulling carts. Weren’t they going to Utah?’
Turner smiled approvingly at the boy.
‘Well, I’m glad to observe that you have listened to what I have said and, what’s even better, remembered it. Yes, they were Saints. Ten years since, they set up in Utah and then said that the whole of the Utah Territory belonged to them. Right from the Pacific Ocean to the Mexican border and up into Oregon. Called the territory Deseret. Well, they didn’t take none too kindly to that notion in Washington. Cut the territory down to a smaller size and allowed that Brigham Young, their prophet, could be the governor. It ain’t worked out too well, though, from all that I am able to apprehend.’
James’s eyes lit up with a sudden memory. He said to his father: ‘Hey Pa, didn’t a bunch of them pass through Iowa when I was real little? I seem to mind that we stood on a hill nigh to the farm and watched a lot of wagons and cattle passing by. I’m sure I recollect you telling me as they were Mormons.’
‘I’m surprised that you remember that. You couldn’t have been above six years of age when they passed by. But yes, that was the Saints, as they prefer to call themselves. They’d been driven out of Illinois in what came pretty close to being a war. They had more or less a whole entire town to themselves, place called Nauvoo, which they named from the Bible.
‘Anyways, they set up their own army and were near to declaring their independence from the Union. After their leader, fellow called Smith, was killed, they upped and left, headed out West.’
James didn’t know what to say to this. He wished to make some intelligent observation, such as would confirm his father’s wisdom in treating him more as an equal than as a child. Despite this, nothing came to mind and he accordingly waited for his father to carry on with what he was saying.
‘What it is, James, is this,’ Turner said. ‘To all intents and purposes Utah has now declared its independence. Young says that they are a nation under the rule of God and that they want no more to do with Washington. Carry on down that road and pretty soon you’ll be having a civil war. So the army have come to bring them back into the fold.
‘This affects us, because we will have to pass through Utah on our way to Sacramento. It should be safe enough, with the soldiers about, but we need to take our own precautions as well. We’ll talk further on this.’
That night the wagon train stopped on the banks of a shallow river, which would need to be forded the next day. Most of the families collected their water right from near to where they were camping, at which Lee Turner shook his head in amazement.
‘No wonder so many folk get the cholera on these expeditions,’ he said. ‘Just look at the filthy way they carry on.’
In years to come the legend grew that the greatest peril faced by those pioneers was from murderous savages, intent on scalping them. It was nothing of the sort. A thousand times more pioneers were killed by disease than ever died at the hands of the Indians. Each successive party of westbound migrants, knowing that they would not be passing this way again, were free and easy with disposing of their waste. Latrines were dug near rivers and no attempt was made to clean up the camp when they moved on. This meant that when the next wagon train came to that spot the water that they used was apt to be fouled. A consequence of this was that dysentery, typhoid and cholera were endemic along the whole length of the Oregon Trail. Some wise folk, like the Turners, took care to avoid falling sick.
‘You two might fetch us a couple of pails of water,’ said Turner, when they had stopped for the night. Almost without exception the other members of the wagon train went straight to the nearest spot on the riverbank to fill their containers with water. Not so the Turners.
The two young people trudged a quarter-mile upstream, making absolutely sure as they went that they had passed well beyond any signs of camping or other human activity. This way, they could be sure that the water they fetched was fresh and had not been contaminated by running past a spot where somebody had relieved his bladder or washed his boots.
Lee Turner was mighty strict, too, about ensuring that his family always washed their hands thoroughly before handling food. The result was that his was the only family over the last three months that had not had any sign of sickness.
It was after their meal that evening that a foolish and pointless incident occurred; it was to seal the fate of the Turner family in various unexpected ways. The matter which had such far-reaching effects had its origin in a trifling quarrel between two of the scouts, whose job it was to ride on in advance of the wagons, looking for possible trouble on the trail ahead.
On and off for the past week or more these men, Mike Mallon and Chris Bridges, had been arguing over a gambling debt. The precise details are nothing to the purpose; it is enough that Chris was utterly convinced that his erstwhile friend had cheated him out of eleven dollars in the course of a game of cards. The quarrel festered on, souring relations between the two men, until that evening, after the sun had set and everybody had eaten, it erupted in violence.
There was a good deal of debate later as to who had first drawn a pistol and tried to shoot the other. Judging by the fact that the witnesses were pretty evenly divided between those who swore that Chris Bridges had been the first to go for his gun and others who were prepared to take oath that it was Mike Mallon who drew on the other man, it may be guessed that there wasn’t much in it.
At any rate, the two of them began shooting at each other more or less simultaneously, sending everybody in the camp diving for cover or hiding behind their wagons. Incredible as it might sound to anybody who has not witnessed a shoot-out like this, neither man succeeded in hitting the other. Chances are that they weren’t even aiming at each other, the intention chiefly being to scare the shit out of the other fellow and indicate that somebody was greatly vexed with him.
Bridges and Mallon might not have shot each other, but one stray bullet found a target in James Turner’s ankle. By a great mercy, the ball caught that young man only a glancing blow, barely breaking the skin. The force, though, was sufficient to break the bone, with agonizing consequences.
James had, like many others, been sheltering behind the family’s wagon when the shooting began and it was later surmised that the ball that struck him had ricocheted off some solid object, thus losing much of its force. Had it simply hit his ankle straight away, there was every chance that instead of merely being fractured, the bone would have been shattered into atoms.
His father cradled James in his arms as he checked where the ball had hit him. He could see at once that the bone was broken, but was relieved to note that it was not a grave wound and that if the boy had his leg strapped up the bone should heal well enough.
When it became clear that the two gunmen had emptied their weapons Lee Turner relinquished the care of young James to his mother and strode out from behind the wagon. Chris Bridges was standing there with a look of stupid satisfaction on his face; a look that vanished at once when Turner landed a colossal punch on his jaw, dislodging a half-dozen teeth and causing the scout to lose consciousness.
