There are few accounts of the early trips across the Northern Arizona desert. David King Udall, an early pioneer in St. Johns, Arizona made the following comment about the trip in his autobiography; [Udall, David King, Ella Udall, and Ida Hunt Udall. Arizona Pioneer Mormon. Tucson, Ariz: Arizona Silhouettes, 1959.]
We reached St. Johns October 6, 1880, having traveled four hundred miles through a wilderness inhabited page 70 mostly by jackrabbits, prairie dogs, and roaming Indians. The Indians were friendly, due largely to the missionary work of Jacob Hamblin, Anthony W. Ivins, Ammon M. Tenney, Andrew S. Gibbons (Utah pioneer of 1847) and his sons, Ira Hatch, Thales Haskell, and others. Most of the country through which we passed was desolate beyond description. Its terrible remoteness was broken a few years later when the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad (now the Santa Fe) was built through northern Arizona.
It is likely that the severity of the desert left little time to write, with survival being of the utmost importance. The Tanners left no first hand account of their desert crossing, but a couple of stories about the dangers of the trail were preserved.
At one point all of the party's water was gone and the animals were about exhausted. They decided to have Henry Tanner drive the stock loose until they found water. He had hardly gone a quarter of a mile from the camp when he found plenty of water in the holes of the rocks in a stream bed. While Henry was driving the stock, Eliza drove the wagon. A wind storm came up and several trees were blown across the road which had to be removed before they could proceed. Imagine a 19 year old girl driving a team of horses in the midst of a huge storm so fierce that it was blowing down trees. Perhaps you can begin to see what kind of people these pioneers really were.
That is amazing what they went through. You are right--it is hard to imagine!
ReplyDelete