Tales from Torrey
and of Capitol Reef
by James H. Knipmeyer

Part II — 1968:The Three Nephites

I was now in college at the University of Missouri at Columbia. In the past several years, on other vacation trips with my parents and then also with my brother and a neighbor friend, I made more visits to the Colorado Plateau area of southern Utah. I had become very interested with this unique region, geographically unlike any other place on our continent. Along with the hiking, camping, and exploring came a curiosity about the area’s history, and I began collecting and reading everything that I could concerning it.

However, I did not get back to Torrey and Capitol Reef until five years later in the summer of 1968. There were three of us: my brother Bill, a good friend of ours, Mike Martin, who lived just down the street in our hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, and myself. My brother and I had gotten an old 1947 Willys army jeep, and the three of us were now ready to tackle the four-wheel-drive roads in the backcountry of southern Utah.

After an exploratory trip to Lake Powell, we drove north over Boulder Mountain, as my family had done five years earlier. Passing through Torrey without much of a second glance, we headed on to Capitol Reef. It was around lunchtime, and instead of eating out of our food box as we normally did, we turned off the highway south for a short distance to Capitol Reef Lodge, a private holding within the national monument.

Inside it was cool and rather dark. The front door had been open, except for the screen door of course, but there did not seem to be anyone around. We proceeded into a side room that was the dining area, but even though it was close to noontime all of the tables had their chairs stacked neatly on top of them. However, at the far end of the room was a counter with stools, and it had the only lights on above it. So we sat down and helped ourselves to menus. But after several minutes still no one appeared to wait on us.

Mike got up, walked around back of the counter and through an open door beyond. He called out, “Hello! Is anybody here?” and disappeared. A few seconds later we heard a commotion, and Mike came running back through the door with a little old lady literally chasing him with an upraised butcher knife in her hand and yelling, “Who do you think you are? Get out of my kitchen!”
But when she saw my brother and I sitting at the counter, she quickly calmed down and asked what we wanted. We explained that we were simply looking for some lunch. However, she replied that they were not serving meals right then. She also apologized for the disturbance, but explained she was a little hard of hearing and Mike had startled her with his unexpected appearance in the kitchen.

We found out later that the lady was Mrs. Emma Bird, mother of the man who owned Capitol Reef Lodge. The lodge, begun and added onto piecemeal from 1946 to 1950, was purchased by Mr. Archie Bird in 1957. Descended from area pioneer Jorgen Jorgensen, it now belonged to his son, Clair Bird, who operated it with his mother.
Clair Bird had been constantly at odds with the National Park Service since the early 1960s, when he had inherited the lodge operation from his father. One point of contention was that he rarely followed park service concession policy. He would serve meals and drinks only to guests staying at his lodge, and closed the place at some of the busier times of the year. Of this we now had first-hand knowledge!

It was not until ten years later, in 1978, that the lodge holdings and property were purchased by acquisition through “condemnation of taking.” About a year later the park service tore down the lodge building and associated structures. In the 1980s the site was planted with a variety of fruit and nut trees, reconstructing an historic orchard originating from the late 1800s, and thus it remains today.

Settling for some cheese and crackers in the back of the jeep, we drove on east through Capitol Reef to the turnoff to Cathedral Valley. Lying about twenty-five miles to the north, this was an area of spectacularly eroded cliffs, towers, and spires reached only by a primitive dirt road. Leaving the pavement we almost immediately had to ford the shallow Fremont River before winding our way up and through the colorful clay-shale hills beyond. We understood these to be known as the Pinto Hills because of their coloring, though we later also heard them referred to as the Painted Hills and the Rainbow Hills, all for the same reason of course.
Crossing the expanse of Upper Blue Flats, we ascended Bentonite Hill, similar in shape and appearance to those earlier, but stark and drab in comparison. This brought us up to the next level known simply as The Hartnet. The dark bulk of Thousand Lake Mountain rose up to the west, while south of us, far in the distance, were the Henry Mountains. In the other directions the land sloped gradually upwards toward the horizon.

Cathedral Valley had received its name in the 1940s when Charles Kelly, first custodian and superintendent of Capitol Reef, and other “travel writers” were first guided into the area by local ranchers. Many of the modern names of individual features were bestowed at this time. There were four or five of the cathedral-like “temples” jutting upwards from the floor of the valley below. One of these, I had read somewhere, escaped the grander names given by the visiting writers and was known to stockmen who ran cattle in the area simply as “Shirley’s Temple.”   Cathedral Valley 1991

All of this region had been used as grazing areas by ranchers from the little Fremont River towns of Caineville and Giles since the 1880s. Sometime in the latter part of that decade a Fremont man, David Hartnet, traced out an extremely rough wagon road that led up and over Thousand Lake Mountain, down the Polk Creek drainage, and staying on this high divide where we were between Cathedral Valley and South Desert, wound its way eastwards and across The Hartnet to Rock Water Spring. From there it cut northeast to Willow Seep and thence down Caineville Wash to the Fremont River settlements. This route was then used by residents of Fremont, Loa, and Lyman to reach the “lower” settlements of Caineville, Giles, and Hanksville. It eliminated the potentially risky crossings of Capitol Reef by either the Fremont River canyon or the Capitol Wash gorge. Much of the present-day road that we had driven followed the same route as this original Hartnet road, but it was not graded and “improved” until 1954.

It was now late in the afternoon, so the three of us decided not to drive down into Cathedral Valley itself. Not far behind us we had seen a dim track dropping down into South Desert. Consulting our maps we saw that it connected up several miles to the south with the road we had come in by, making a large loop. So we decided to take it. It was a steep, narrow, switchbacking dugway, with big rocks and several large, washed out places. It was rough even with our jeep in four-wheel low. Just below the rim at the first switchback we passed a now-undeveloped spring with a small, broken down fence enclosure around it and a couple of old watering troughs. Early rancher, Alonzo Billings, had first built this trail down into the upper end of South Desert off of the Hartnet road in the mid-1890s, and which later cattlemen had improved into a “road.”

A short ways down into South Desert we pulled off to the side of the road to camp for the night. It had been hot during the day and in the evening, even after the sun went down behind Thousand Lake Mountain, it stayed very warm. But like most high-desert regions as the night wore on, it gradually began to cool off, and by the time the nearly full moon rose from behind the spire of an ancient volcanic plug to the east, the three of us finally sought our sleeping bags.

The next morning, after a quick breakfast and packing up our camping gear, we had not been driving over five minutes before the jeep began to run hot. Besides the red indicator light on the dashboard, we could both hear it and smell it! We stopped and looked under the hood, and there was very little water visible in the radiator. So we poured in half of our four-quart canteen of drinking water. We drove on but a short ways, and it registered hot again. We now found just what the problem was, a cracked water pump. There was nothing to do but walk back out to the highway, even though it was quite a few miles distant. We took with us only the clothes that we were wearing, hiking boots, hats, our half a canteen of water, a cloth bag with some Vienna sausages and crackers, and a hand-mirror in case we had the opportunity to signal somebody. We left a note on the windshield of the jeep telling what had happened and which way we were going, if someone should happen by. We figured to stick to the road because I knew that Lurt Knee at Sleeping Rainbow Guest Ranch at Capitol Reef took occasional jeep tours into Cathedral Valley.

We plodded past the eroded spire known as The Steeple and climbed out by another rough dugway about mid-way through the length of South Desert. It was now starting to get hot, and we stopped every so often under the scant shade of a pinyon or juniper tree and took a swallow each from the canteen. We trudged on, and the small patches of snow still remaining high up on Thousand Lake Mountain were a continual enticement to us. It was August, the hottest time of the year, and by noontime the temperature was well up into the 90s. A part of Coleridge’s “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” kept running through my head: “All in a hot and copper sky the bloody sun at noon, right above the mast did stand, no bigger than the moon.” It was beyond the three of us how this barren-looking landscape that surrounded us on all sides could ever have been grazing land for cattle.

By the time we got to the top of Bentonite Hill, there were no more trees. It now must have been 100 degrees, and the only shade in sight was an abandoned drilling rig near the road about two miles away. It seemed like hours for us to get there, but it probably only took about forty-five minutes. A water well had been sunk here; there was a small marshy area, some reeds and small tamarisk bushes, and water! We crawled under the drilling rig and stayed in its shade for nearly four hours during the hottest part of the afternoon, eating some of our food and drinking water. Around five o’clock we walked on out the last few miles to the highway.

Mike had torn the bottom half of his shirt off, to catch what slight breeze there might have been, and we must have looked like three tramps with our canteen and bag of food. At any rate, we did not get a lift from a passing motorist for over half-an-hour. Finally, one car slowed down, and Mike literally ran alongside it pleading for a ride. Two fellows on their way to California took us on to Torrey, where we had noticed a gas station the day before. The people at one of the two stations said they could not do anything for us that evening, so we walked on up the road to the Chuck Wagon Cafe & Motel. When we told him what all had happened and explained our situation, the man there promptly gave us a room without even quoting us a price or asking if we had any money. He and his family were on their way to a wedding dance and the café was closed, but his wife took the time to fix us some cold sandwiches and drinks anyway. A bath and a soft bed sure felt good that night. All three of us were completely worn out.

The next morning we went down to the Sinclair service station. The owner’s son was in town visiting, and he helped us out. He had a four-wheel-drive Ford Bronco that he could tow our jeep with. We measured from the highway to where we had left the jeep, and it was almost twenty miles exactly that we had walked the previous day. On the way back Bill and Mike rode in the jeep, and I stayed with the Bronco

.The gentleman’s name was Brinkerhoff, and he and his family lived up in Salt Lake City. But he had grown up around Torrey, and his family used to run cattle out in Cathedral Valley. One time, he told me, he had to walk out closer to forty miles. He had carelessly allowed his horse to get a deep scratch on its back from a tree branch, so his dad and uncle made him walk all the way back to teach him a lesson. He said there weren’t any “good” roads into Cathedral Valley until the uranium boom of the 1950s. He also related that there were now “new” names for a lot of the geographic features, no more The Meadow, or Santa Claus Hill, among others. Mr. Brinkerhoff maintained that the surrounding land was not really good for anything except scenery. It had a little of a lot of things, like minerals of various kinds or feed plants for livestock, but not enough of any one resource to be worthwhile. He did admit, though, that it was a beautiful country. He said that his great-grandfather, an early resident of the region, had a saying, “Southern Utah is what was left over after God made the rest of the earth.”

The day was Friday, and they had to send up to Richfield in Sevier County to get a new water pump for our jeep. This could not be done until Monday, and then it would take another couple of days to first get it delivered and then to install it. So it looked like the three of us would be in Torrey for a few more days.

On Saturday I hitchhiked down to Capitol Reef to the Visitor Center. Most of the exhibits there dealt with the geology of the region, its prehistoric inhabitants, and finally the early explorers and settlers. The immediate area surrounding the Visitor Center were the narrow valleys at the junction of Sulphur Creek and the Fremont River. Orchards and fields, irrigated from the prevalent water supply, occupied much of the area, and up until a few years ago several homesteads dotted the landscape. The first permanent resident settled here about 1880. As other families soon arrived, a community began to spring up that was known as Junction, because of its location. However, when a post office was eventually established, that name was already “taken,” so the residents came up with the name Fruita, for the numerous orchards located there.

Hemmed in by towering cliffs and high ridges, land for crops and fields was necessarily limited. As a result Fruita never had a population of more than a dozen or so families. After the region became a national monument in 1937, and especially after achieving national park status in 1971, the federal government began buying out the private holdings that still existed. Today the area is known as the Fruita Rural Historic District. Most of the dwellings and buildings that dated back only in the 1900s have been removed, but a few earlier structures and the orchards going back as far as the late 1800s are still preserved and maintained. Leaving the Visitor Center, I crossed the highway and walked along the north side of the river until I came to a marked area on the left. Here on a high, sheer cliff are many petroglyph figures carved by the Fremont people. One of the greatest concentrations and some of the finest sites of the prehistoric Fremont Culture are found in the Capitol Reef area. In comparison with the better known Anasazi Culture, which left us the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, Colorado, for example, the Fremont is less complex, with much smaller living and associated structures. Yet its rock art is artistically better than that of other cultures and includes some of the finest examples anywhere in the world. Much of the current data suggests that the cultural configuration recognized by archeologists as Fremont dates largely between 1000 and 1200 A.D

Fields of Fruita circa 1978

The name Fremont Culture was applied in the late 1920s by anthropologist Noel Morss of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. He spent two years in the Torrey-Capitol Reef area studying the sites and cultural remains of its prehistoric inhabitants. He drew the name, obviously, from the Fremont River that flows through the region he investigated. The river, in turn, had been named for the explorer John C. Fremont, who in the winter of 1853-54, traversed the nearby uplands in search of a practical route for a transcontinental railroad.

On Sunday, Mike, my brother Bill, and I were invited to “speak” at the LDS church. Having no appropriate clothes to wear, however, we had to politely decline. That afternoon we did help Mr. Tolbert tear down a back stairway and put up a basketball goal. The Elletts, Rulon and Bertha, whom we had met on our first evening in Torrey, owned the combination café and motel (also the adjoining gift and rock shop), but lived outside of nearby Bicknell, Utah, where they also did some ranching and farming. The Tolberts, LaVoy and Janece, operated the place for them and lived upstairs over the café and gift shop. They both taught school in Bicknell, but during the “tourist season,” May through September, they put in most of their time at the Chuck Wagon.

Janece shot baskets with us after we got the goal put up. We soon learned that she had been an extremely good basketball player when she was in high school. In 1968 this was a surprise to us, as girls interscholastic sports in Kansas City, where we were from, were practically non-existent at the time. The state of Utah has long been ahead of most other regions in providing equal athletic opportunities for girls as well as boys. LaVoy, however, did not play because of a crippled right hand. He told us that he had injured it some twenty years earlier when he was about fourteen years old. He had entangled it in his rope while lassoing calves on what he termed a “wildish horse.”

Terry, Lavoy and Davey Tolbert, June 1969

Monday morning we checked with the service station and were informed that the water pump had been ordered and should arrive sometime the next afternoon. Then they would put it on first thing the following day. We stayed and visited with the elderly gentleman for a while. His name was Dennis Brinkerhoff. Like his son who had towed our jeep out of South Desert, he too had been raised in the Capitol Reef area, but had been living in Anchorage, Alaska. He had come back to Torrey four years earlier to run the service station after his father had passed away. His grandfather was Elijah Behunin, who had helped make the first road through Capitol Gorge. Among other occupations he was a stone mason and had built their house in Torrey just east of the station. Mr. Brinkerhoff recalled that his grandfather had a “fiery red beard and a temper to match.” He further said that, “Though LDS, he had an incurable habit of smoking. When the local bishop protested once too often about this, Grandfather Behunin, just for spite, supposedly continued to roll his own hand-made cigarettes, but this time using pages torn out of The Book of Mormon!”
Elijah Cutler Behunin was called by the Mormon hierarchy to Wayne County in 1882 to help settle the Fremont River valley near where the town of Caineville later would be. His small log cabin is still standing today. For a short period of time around 1891, Behunin and his family moved several miles farther west and built a more substantial house of quarried rock. Though this home is, like the first, still standing, within a year or so the contrary Fremont River washed away most of their farmland, necessitating a move to the settlement of Notom, several miles up Pleasant Creek from the Fremont.

The Behunin Cabin at Caineville, Utah

In 1893 the Behunin family relocated to Fruita, on the opposite, or west, side of Capitol Reef. There they stayed until 1902, when they again moved, this time to Fish Creek, south of Torrey. This move was mainly to be with some of their married children, who were moving there to claim acreage of their own. The elder Behunins relocated one last time, in 1907, to the comparative comforts of the nearby town of Torrey. Cutler, by which name he was always known, had a tremendous love of the great outdoors, and he excelled as a hunter and trapper. But his first love, however, was prospecting for gold. Whenever things at home were going well and he was able to do so, he would saddle up his horse and head out into the mountains and canyons for a month at a time. The Henry Mountains to the east were his favorite prospecting area.

Cutler bought his first and only car in 1931, a Model-A roadster convertible, according to Mr. Brinkerhoff. It no doubt was the most exciting purchase of his life, and he spent a great many happy and contented hours cruising about the town and county. Always, however, Cutler wanted to drive too fast, and his desire to speed was a great concern to his family. Long, slow trips in ponderous old wagons were now a thing of the past, and some of his children reasoned that he was just showing the old dusty and bumpy roads his heels. Finally, in the fall of 1933, he tried to negotiate a sharp curve too fast, lost control, flipped over the vehicle, and was killed instantly.

As the three of us were walking along the road from the service station back to the Chuck Wagon, an older gentleman driving a big yellow Buick sedan pulled up beside us and asked, “Aren’t you the boys who walked out of South Desert?” When we admitted we were, he introduced himself as Cass Mulford. He went on to say that he had some peach groves down at Capitol Reef, and that if we got down there we were welcome to all we wanted!

Sometime in the late 1800s, Charles Mulford and his family arrived in Fruita and settled down to farming. In 1922, his son Clarence “Cass” Mulford, acquired some fifty-seven acres from part of the original Hyrum Behunin (Elijah’s brother) homestead. In 1929 he added another eighty-eight acres, calling his place Diamond Ranch. From then until the early 1960s, Cass was the most important orchard grower on Fruita’s south end. He was also one of the few Fruita residents who owned cattle. As a sideline he would hire out horses, and himself, for guided trail rides through the Capitol Reef area.

In 1962, the National Park Service acquired Cass’ 145-acre property through purchase. Like several other former Fruita residents who had sold out to the park service, Cass now lived in Torrey. However, he continued to maintain his peach and apricot orchard by special use permit until the early 1970s. He paid annual fees to the park service in exchange for the fruit harvested. Thus his offer to us in 1968. In 1977, however, the Mulford orchard was removed and is now a grassy field.

The rest of the day Mike, Bill, and I mostly just hung around the café, talking with Flora and Theresa. They were the Ellett’s daughters and worked as waitresses in the café. All this time, of course, we had been eating our meals at the café, and Flora and Theresa always gave us second helpings and extras of things, at no charge. In return, at night we would help them “close up,” mopping the floors and washing the windows. Then LaVoy would make everyone milkshakes, and we would sit around and visit.
The new water pump finally arrived for the jeep and was installed, but we decided to stay around the remainder of the day and leave early the next morning. We liked it here! When we got back to our motel room, we found that Janece had gotten our big bag of dirty clothes and had washed them all for us. I dare say that would probably not happen in too many places!

The next morning, after a big breakfast, we prepared to leave Torrey and all of our new friends. We settled up our bill with LaVoy and he charged us a total of $40.00. That only came to between six and seven dollars a night for three of us, but he refused to take any more. Mrs. Ellett said we would always be welcome, and that we would now have a family out here in Utah, also!
Afterwards, Bill, Mike, and I, often spoke of our good fortune. Obviously the Elletts and the Tolberts were very kind and considerate people who would go out of their way to help someone in need. Then, too, that seems to be more the general attitude of “small town” folks and the Mormon people in particular. But I sometimes have wondered if it just might have been something else also, at least in the beginning.

The story of the Three Nephites is a deeply ingrained one among the Mormon people and in the towns of Utah. According to The Book of Mormon, immediately after His ascension from Palestine, Jesus appeared to the Nephites, the native peoples of the Americas. Here he went through a kind of New World re-enactment of his mission in Judea. As in the middle-eastern Holy Land, he chose twelve disciples from among the Nephites. At the conclusion of his “American mission,” Jesus gathered the twelve about him and asked them to tell him their heart’s desire. Nine of them promptly requested that when their time on earth was done that they be immediately taken into the Kingdom of Heaven. But the remaining three, somewhat hesitantly, asked that they be allowed to live until the Second Coming, never suffering death. This He granted to them.

Thus, the three Nephite disciples had a change wrought over them so that they would not be susceptible to pain, cold, hunger, or aging. They have remained from that day to this, traveling the length and breadth of the land. The three are usually, though not always, described as elderly appearing men having snow-white hair and long beards, but with a youthful vigor about them. They are often poorly or plainly dressed, and are always well-spoken and mild in speech.

In almost all instances the Three Nephites come in the guise of travelers asking for food or lodging. Their customary thanks is to heal a sick person, bless the household, or promise health and prosperity. Most of the people who have encountered them were not aware at the time who they were. But upon departure they always mysteriously “vanished,” and then it dawned on the hosts just who they were. Thus, at many houses a stranger, or strangers, in need is not likely to be turned away from a devout Mormon’s door.

Introduction
Part I — 1963: The First Visit
Part III — 1969: Home
Part IV — Early 1970's: The Prodigal Son Returns
Part V — 1967-1987 Interlude
PVI — 1990's: The Last Years
Epilogue — 2000