St. Thomas, Nevada: A History Uncovered

Not a Town of the Past . . .”

60 After the Mormon exodus, St. Thomas was a much different place. Opportunists moved in and stripped the town of everything of value. For a time, the town looked more like Dodge City than Salt Lake City, with prospecting , hard drinking, gambling, and horse racing. The experience of the Syphus family shows just how different a town St. Thomas was after the Saints left. Luke and Julie Syphus moved to St. Thomas in 1887, as Luke had received the contract to carry the mail to area mining camps. His duties required him to be gone every other night. To protect his wife, Syphus built a platform high up in a cottonwood tree where she kept her bed. On the nights he was away, Julie climbed up her perch and drew the ladder up behind her. She would then lay trembling with fear, “as the drunken desperadoes rode the streets shooting their guns and yelling out foul language.”1 It is not just polite white society that fell apart. Changes in policies toward the Paiutes brought deterioration in white-Native American relationships as well as the creation of the Moapa Paiute Reservation. The general lawlessness did not prevail indefinitely, however. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Mormons returned to the Moapa Valley, where they established a school, reestablished the St. Thomas Ward, and generally put the town on a more stable economic footing. The departing missionaries sent a party of nine explorers to reconnoiter the area in Kane County, arriving on Christmas Day, 1870. The explorers found a valley one hundred yards wide to three-quarters of a mile wide and barely twenty miles long. The east fork of the Virgin River ran the length 4 “Not a Town of the Past . . .” From Zion to the Silver State From Zion to the Silver State 61 of the valley, but it scarcely held enough water to irrigate the thirteen hundred acres of arable land. Abraham Kimball, speaking of the valley, said, “Of all the vallies [sic] I ever saw it was one, no one team could pull an empty wagon out of it [because of its high sides], and hardly wide enough to turn a wagon around.”2 The church also faced the unresolved issue of obtaining cotton. A main priority for the settlement of Utah’s Dixie was for the production of cotton, and from 1865 to 1870 the Muddy Mission provided most of the cotton that came out of the area. Erastus Snow sent letters to the settlers who remained, asking them to place a renewed emphasis on cotton growing to compensate for the lost production.3 The missionaries on the Muddy barely made a clean getaway from Nevada. Besides their difficulties with state and county officials, the Saints faced other difficulties as they fled. Brigham Young described the exodus thus: “As the brethren left their homes . . . there were stragglers hanging around like sharks in the wake of a ship—who slipped into the houses of the saints so soon as they left them and commenced gathering up every thing of value and taking possession of the best houses &c. . . . [T]he Indians set fire to the houses as soon as the Saints left, and before the latter were out of sight nothing remained of their pleasant homes but the blackened walls.” This move, caused by the “rapacity and hostility of the political cormorants who devour the earnings of the people of Nevada,” was made even more miserable by the almost two feet of snow that fell in the Beaver Dam area during their exodus.4 Arriving in Long Valley on the first of March, the missionaries quickly planted spring wheat and established a town they named Glendale. Continuing their streak of bad luck, the new transplants saw grasshoppers destroy their crops.5 A smaller number of the displaced Saints settled in Orderville, four miles to the south. Others simply went back to the places they had been called from in the first place. The Mormons’ time on the Muddy left a complicated legacy. William Wood, who had given up a successful business and a comfortable brick home in Salt Lake City when called in 1867, ended up back in Salt Lake living in a dugout. When he asked his wife, Elizabeth, if she would rather they had never left in the first place, she replied, “I am glad you have filled your missions, and would rather be in this dugout with your mission filled, than in that fine house...