On the land where, once, nothing was long ago

I have been musing on my ancestral family. Most were in Cedar or Parowan in 1857. There was little mention of my Great, Great, Grandfather when his wife was deeply embedded in an Indian Tribe with her young children. Daniel Matheson would have probably picked up the Indigenous languages quickly, he had had three years of college at St. Andrews in Edinborough.

He, I then presume, would have had a familiarity with Scots Gaelic, English, Latin and Greek, perhaps some French. So, Brigham very likely sent him to live among the Indians to pick up their languages. Jacob Hamblin spoke Hopi, Navaho and what anthropologists call Uto-Aztecan. What the Feds called Injun. They called themselves Pa or pi--meant the people of the ede, which was a suffix meaning water.

A clover when stressed, bore large seeds, kept water where, in the valleys, its nitrogen rich roots mixed with the edible roots of a large seeded tall grass called faleris. The valley was the meeting ground of Shoshone, Piedes, and other peoples, excluding the Utes. The border between land claimed by the Spanish and the land claimed by the Utes, was a swath a few hundreds of miles North of Parowan. Many birds sang there, mushrooms lined the creeks, and what we ploughed dried up and between our rows of wheat, blew away on the wind.

Grandpa said they laughed at our foolishness, but there came, in 1857, a deep drought and we took to running sheep which dried the land farther. Among the accusations made by Buchanon was that, in fewer words, we were going Indian.
We needed someone to teach us how to treat our Indians--Squaw killer Harney being his first choice. He'd made such a reputation for himself with the Eastern tribes going on to the Sioux.

After the Meadows, when all the houses in Salt Lake were set to light by young boys, Pa Snow's generation in Dad's war, Harney was sent back East. In any Democracy, it's an embarrassment when the Governed make a great deal of noise about the replacement of their elected Governor with someone so odious to them that they'd leave them nothing but scorched Earth.
Gibbs cites this as proof of fanaticism.

So, for their fanaticism, they got a Governor named Cummings.
I think it may have been the Mormon writer Vardis Fisher (so this is Apocrypha) who had Brother Brigham take his replacement around to catch the stragglers, leaving the city to Pa Snow's generation and their torches.

I'm not sure that Cummings shed tears. He ordered his Army to skirt the settlement--make their camp on the dry Western sides of the valleys--in Salt Lake City, Beaver City where the Federal Court was to be, and Cedar City to ride heard on us and our Nauvoo legion, who had used the Federal Army to ferret out the men who used Brother Joseph, the Prophet, for target
practice, plugging him with 40 pistol balls.

When the Mountain Meadows Generation passed on, leaving
their treasures to my Great Grandfather, later to my Grandpa's second hand store, they left many of their hunting rifles, seldom turned to war.

Since I havn't been back home--I've been too ill, but dearly missed it, I can see each weapon, back to Spanish Casle key guns, women's tiny garter guns's, a priest's rock amulet. Blessed, those who have passed on--how much we love then despite their errors and many defeats.

There is a time when John D. Lee--or someone, I'm writing from memory, asks a young translator to bring the Santa Clara Indians around. My Great-Great Grandfather might have been so described at that time, he was young, he followed orders.

I suspect Dear President Hinkley produced an apology, thorough two younger intermediaries, while genuous, was intended for airing overseas. We take as few lives as possible, as many prisoners as possible. In those days, not so long ago we hated the Eastern Press, and blamed it for our sufferings. I
suspect that there were 8-12 Missouri Wildcats taking turns brandishing the porcelain gun who they said killed our prophet.

Most were probably killed on the first night and were buried in the pit in the center of their laager. It may have been no Piute who killed them, but the sharpshooting personal guard of Joseph Smith who went to guarding Brother Brigham.

My friend who ate Oatmeal said of Cherokee traditions of torture that they hated to do it, but their lands were coveted by
surrounding tribes, whose land was not so rich. They felt it neccesary to make them fear them, and they had strong magick.
He said that they tied the warrior between two trees and cut a shallow line between his collar bones and groin. There was a
special fly--I suspect a mosquito-- that was drawn to the mosture, it lay it's eggs in the trench, directly into the circulatory system. The flap of skin sealed and the man's kin believed him to be killed by magic. His grandfather believed that the fly lay its eggs, which hatched young so small that they passed into the brain causing great suffering.

As in the British Mills, the bran and germ of the decimating wheat, went to the dogs and poor, with suet mixed in for the dogs. The rule back home with dogs was working dogs only. That was because the bran and germ went to compensate the Indians for the ruin of their lush vallies .

Compensate, hell, we just didn't know our place. So they put the Indians on land that was not arable. There was more water than is there today, but it wasn't land where anything could be grown.

My Great Great grandmother scared off quite a large band of Indians who had come to borrow some wheat flower. She crawled under a bed and rocked the baby's cradle from there.
The Indians looked in the window and saw only the cradle,
rocking, and they yelped and ran away. This was a story
Grandpa told me in the car going to the doctor in Salt Lake.