Journeys West: Jane and Julian Steward and Their Guides

10. Trail's End

10. Trail’s End Steward left salt lake city the day after his wife boarded the train for Washington. His original plan called for spending a week at the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, then driving west to Skull Valley and Deep Creek Valley to find Goshute informants. With less than three weeks to finish his own field research, he needed to complete one piece of work as well for the bae in western Nevada. It added up to nearly two thousand extra miles of travel but provided a chance to circle back through southern Nevada, where he hoped to find a Southern Paiute elder to serve as his last informant. And he still needed to visit one or two reservations in Utah in order to write a report for the bia. Time was running short.1 When his work at the Uintah and Ouray Reservation did not go well, he set aside his first plan and left after just one day. Hoping to put his waning time in the field to better use, he reversed course and drove back across the Wasatch Mountains, where groves of quaking aspens gleamed bright gold in the sunlight. The shimmering silvergreen trees of summer now wore the rich colors of autumn. Stands of mountain maples shone copper and bronze, lighting up the slopes and heralding the coming cold. Descending from fall flamboyance in the mountains to a dry plain, Steward continued on toward Skull Valley in Utah’s west desert. The highway passed between the southern shore of Great Salt Lake and the northern end of the Oquirrh Mountains. John Muir had walked in those mountains sixty years earlier, during the summer of 1877. 269 Trail’s End Steward drove by the northern slope where Muir had climbed toward the crest, a place that he would not have recognized in 1936. Muir recorded seeing thick stands of spruce and quaking aspens and fields of wild lilies. “The whole mountain-side was aglow” with lilies in full bloom, he said, from an elevation of “fifty-five hundred feet to the very edge of the snow” near the peak. As he climbed he noticed tracks of deer and wild sheep that lived in the high country. An arresting scene—of mountains and wildflowers and shining colors— lingered in his mind’s eye. “[A]mong my memories of this strange land,” Muir wrote, “that Oquirrh mountain, with its golden lilies, will ever rise in clear relief.” By 1936 that scene was no more than an old memory recorded in the pages of a book. Muir had died twenty-two years earlier, some said from a broken heart, a witness to the devastation inflicted on the Sierra Nevada and other western lands. On the northern slope of the Oquirrh Mountains, the lily fields and trees that he admired and wrote about lovingly, had vanished.2 Walter Cottam believed that a smelter built at the foot of the slope around the turn of the century explained the loss of life and erosion on the mountain. The trees and other plants were probably all dead by 1920, he said, killed by toxic fumes from the smelter. When heavy rain fell on the bare land, it cut gullies that deepened over time. Cottam began to take students in his ecology courses to the site, to see the ruin. He ignored No Trespassing signs posted by a mining company that owned the land and smelter. For Cottam, the importance of this lesson in ecology for his students took precedence over property rights that had allowed the destruction.3 As Steward passed through Garfield, the company town where the smelter stood, the usual pall of blue-gray smoke hung over it. The smelter, a sprawling structure of steel and sheet-iron, produced blister copper from ore, which was then shipped to refineries in other 270 part 3 states. The ore came from an enormous open-pit mine in a canyon to the south.4 A mile or two from Garfield, he drove past waste from the smelting process. The molten slag, carried away from the smelter and dumped there, formed high mounds. At night the glow of molten rock was visible for miles—a sad successor to the glowing lilies of the Oquirrhs.5 Skull Valley’s resonant English name captured the bare-as-bones look of the land. The name Goshutes, which Steward learned meant Dust Utes, was both apt...