DRY CRIK Journal

I was called by some of my Mormon relatives to drop off in St. George, Utah, because people thought there was too much cancer in the downwind area from the bomb tests. And I first had to investigate. The real fighters, by the way, were women. And they convinced me that there was something there. Soon thereafter I ended up representing uranium miners who had mined uranium.

These were the soldiers of the Cold War, these people, that were sacrificed. And the government lied to them. Lied. Lied. That there was no danger. And it looked the other way.

So I went to court. We had a big trial in Salt Lake. We had one with my Navajo uranium miners in Phoenix. We lost. We lost. I went to the Supreme Court of the United States, I didn’t get a vote. You cannot sue the sovereign, the old English principle. And then some good congressman and senators got together and legislation was passed, providing modest payments to these victims and these families.

And I was about to quit and retire last summer, I’m 81 as of this week, and I said I’ve got to continue to help finish the job. Because there’s still a lot of people who haven’t been taken care of.

So this last part of my life has been involved in writing books. I’ve written four. I’m going to talk about one or two here today. And in seeking justice – justice – from the United States of America.

Arizonans like to think we’re noted for straight talk. And I’m going to tell you my favorite political story of all stories. It’s a straight-talk story. Barry Goldwater ran for president, my brother ran for president, John McCain ran for president, an none of them got all that far. And they said, “They’re too frank. They’re too straight.” And those of you who don’t know, I’m going to tell you today, Sandra Day O’Conner, who was selected by President Reagan to be the first woman on the United States Supreme Court, was a ranch girl. Ranch girl. Her father, a man I met, was a rancher from Peloncillo Mountains west of Lordsburg – rugged country, hardscrabble. That’s where she grew up and spent her summers and a lot of other time, on the ranch. When Sandra was nominated for the Supreme Court, no one was more proud than Barry Goldwater, because the first Supreme Court woman Justice was going to be from Arizona. And two days later, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, you rememer him, he held a press conference and he said that this was a bad woman and a bad choice. That she had voted wrong on an abortion bill in the Legislature and, worse than that, she had been president of Planned Parenthood – some kind of subversive organization – for 10 years. He said he was sure President Reagan didn’t know these things, and if every good Christian would write or wire or call the White House, that he would withdraw this offensive name.

The reporters rushed over to Senator Goldwater’s office and informed of this. And of course, he was furious, and of course he didn’t budge an inch. He said, “Falwell doesn’t know what he talking about. Every good Christian should line up and kick Falwell’s ass.”

My brother and the friendship that we’ve had with Barry Goldwater, both Mo and Barry are gone now, is something I could tell you about but I don’t have time. But that was front page, and Mo, my brother, scribbled a note and had it hand-delivered over to Senator Goldwater’s office, and he said, “Barry: Terrific idea. But it won’t work. Falwell’s a good Christian – he’ll turn the other cheek.”

I have – maybe that’s one of the things that drew me to want to come and listen to the cowboy poets here – a limited cowboy heritage of my own. I grew up in a little Mormon-Catholic town, the only one like it right on the Arizona-New Mexico border. And my father, who was the county judge, owned a half-interest in a cattle ranch. I was 11, 12, along in there, and this is the early 30s, the Depression, and so I went out for two months every summer to be with the cowboys. And they had a horse and saddle for me, and my duties were wrangling the remuda in the morning, keeping the fire burning for the branding irons, and taking care of roasting the mountain oysters.

I learned something about cowboys, and I sort of found the same thing with the uranium miners. Both of these are the toughest jobs, in my view, the toughest jobs that there are. And the thing that’s characteristic is that you never heard them whine or complain. And whatever they had to do, they did it. And they were patient. If adversity hit them, they were strong. And so that’s what I learned early, and it stayed with me for a lot of my life.

I’m going to talk poetry for a minute, because one of the wonderful things that happened to Lee and I was that we became Robert Frost friends in Washington the last three years of his life. We were sort of his agents, and I wouldn’t say “manager,” nobody could manage him. But as I listened to J.B. Allen and Wally McRae and Brother Zarzyski and the rest of you, I thought of Frost, ‘cause I have all of the books that he ever wrote, and everything that’s been written about him. And I thought, there’s a commonality here. He was, some of us believe, one of the half-dozen great pastoral poets of all time. A pastoral poet is someone who writes about nature and people and the relationship of the land and people. Robert Frost, one of his lines: “The need to be versed in country things,” he said. And he wrote about, as you are writing about, country people and the human comedy, the human tragedy, the experiences that people have in an outdoor setting, working with animals, working with the land.

Frost’s poetry technique – he called it “the sound of sense” – was using the vernacular. The words that people used in ordinary conversation. I find it in the cowboy poets. That’s where the real poetry is: ordinary speech, ordinary lives. Folk phrases that are there. And while he wrote of rock walls and witches and death and home burial and the hired man, and all of those things, I see a similarity, and I welcome it. And I responded to it immediately.

Frost wrote me a letter. I was responsible, I guess, for getting President Kennedy to invite him to be the first poet, first poet, who was part of the Inaugural Celebration of the President of the United States. That’s a story that I won’t tell you about, but it’s there. And we went to Russia together. He went to see poets, I went to see the big hydroelectric dams. And he wrote me a letter that I prize. He said, here again is his language of the vernacular, he said, “I’m glad to have had you at my side in the last go-down.” And one of his phrases I always liked, it’s sort of impregnated itself into my life, he said, “There’s nothing like turning up somewhere else.” How about that?

So my last four books, each one is different. And I’m going to talk to you briefly today about two of them. Very briefly. One book I did is about the Spanish conquistadores. We have neglected sorely the Spanish history of this country. Coronado came in 1540, 2000 miles from Mexico City up the west coast, all the way to the Smoky Hill River in Kansas. The British – I’m British – the Dutch, the French, they sailed along the Atlantic coast and looked and claimed the land. The Spaniards immediately landed with these little ships and established horse farms in Cuba.

And the horses were part of the conquest of Mexico. And here they are, 20 years later, on horses. There were no horses in what is now the United States. There were no horses. The Spanish brought the horses. The horses changed the lives of the native people. They changed the lives of the settlers who came west, and it’s time that we gave them full credit. And some of the key people were Basques, such as Onate who led the expedition to New Mexico. Twenty-two years before the Pilgrims came ashore in Massachusetts, New Mexico was settled.

De Anza, a military man, led a party of settlers, families, 200 people and animals, from Culiacan to San Francisco to become the founder of San Francisco in 1776. The first great exploration of the United States west was not Lewis and Clark – though they got all the publicity. It was Escalante. And Dominguez. A small party set out by the governor of New Mexico to find a road to Monterrey. Well, the road to Monterrey was barred by the Sierra Nevada, if you know your geography. But they came into the Great Basin. They were the discoverers. Bolton, the historian, said they discovered more new country than Lewis and Clark and others. And so that’s part of their history.

My favorite Nevadan today, my favorite Nevada friend, is Robert Laxalt. I said don’t have me lecture, I’ll do what I did with Senator Goldwater in the last year of his life. I’ll come and we’ll have a conversation. I want to find out, by questioning him, more things about the Basques who came into this state. And if there’s any one book you haven’t read about the West that you should read, it’s Robert Laxalt’s book Sweet Promised Land, a book about his family and his father.

But my other book that I’m going to talk about briefly is my new book, Settlers: The Forgotten Founders. This book is about the Old West. My wife and I, all of our great grandparents were in that first wave. The Old West was from the time Marcus Whitman and his wife, bringing a cow and a sheep with them, went to Oregon in 1835 till the end of the Civil War. That was the Old West. The west of the movies has misled people and wiped out the real settlers. The heroes and heroines in my book are the people who dared to get in a wagon with their wives and their children and their belongings and cross 1000 or 2000 miles of unknown country to settle. That is the great heroic story, and that is what my book is about.

The theme that covers what they did concerns their sense of community and cooperation. The community, the welfare of the group, was more important than the individual. Just the opposite of our society today, all based on the individual, ‘go do your thing, make all the money you can, the hell with the rest.’ My grandfather and others were part of the second generation. And I feel that because I grew up without electricity and with horses and vegetable gardens and things like that, that I know a little bit about the 19th century. But this is an episode in our history. And I’m also, although I’m not supposedly a very religious person, I’m bringing the churches back into western history. They were vital. Not just the Mormons. The whole west, the Spanish part as well. But I just want to give you a little highlight:

My wife’s great grandfather, extraordinary man, his name is William Bailey Maxwell. He, as a young man, was part of that Mormon battalion that walked, that ragtag army, they didn’t even have uniforms, from Iowa to San Diego. And then to rejoin his family in Iowa, he and a few of his friends circled back to Salt Lake City where the first Mormon companies had come, and they went back to Iowa in the winter and almost died. They were saved by the Indians, who befriended them.

But this man ended up with a big ranch down near Pioche. I think he was the first sheriff of Lincoln County, Nevada. But he was a restless person. And before the end of his life, he was part of settling 13 different communities. Nevada and Utah and Arizona and on into Sonora. And that sort of exemplifies some of the qualities that these people had.

What made this such a strong generation was the way people worked together. The community. They had to, to build dams, canals, churches, schoolhouses. They were building from the ground up, and they knew they had to work together. And I saw the end result of this in my little hometown. And I’ve written this part of it, it’s in your program book.

It is a social truism that citizens police themselves when their lives intermingle every day. In my town, for example, this was the 1920s, 30s, the beloved midwife, who delivered me, by the way – Charlotte Sherwood – and the high school music teacher occupied a more vibrant place in the community than the sheriff. Think of that. And codes of conduct inculcated by churches had a stronger influence on behavior than laws enacted by distant legislatures.

Well, there’s a lot we still have to learn. And one of the things that came out of that environment was tolerance. And mutual respect. And a respect for intrinsic things. What a wonderful poetic word. Wally McRae uses it. Intrinsic. Get your dictionary out. It changes, it grows. Robert Frost was always looking for the right word. He’d put a poem aside and sometimes wait 20 years until he got the right word that he wanted for a poem.

But tolerance and mutual respect were important, and people settled their quarrels with fists most of the time. And what happened? What was the first state in the union to let women vote? Western state – Wyoming. I think they had the first governor, as a matter of fact, that was a woman. Even more startling, perhaps, three western states, I wonder if you knew this, had Jewish governors 50 years before New York. Three states: Idaho, Utah, New Mexico. How did that happen? Because people looked at the intrinsic worth of a human being. And that was it – that was it. And so, I love that word, intrinsic.

This is the end of an Emily Dickinson poem. I think this is about a father, a brother, someone, who’s a marvelous person in a family setting but didn’t achieve prominence, didn’t run for political office or something, and Emily Dicjenson wrote this end line:

Lay the laurel on the one too intrinsic for renown.

Think of that for a moment.

So, those are some of the things that I have been concentrating on. You get into your 70s and 80s and think, because you’ve seen more things and had more experiences, that you know more than other people do, or at least you can pretend you do. And I have a verse I’m going to read that expresses, or that bolsters, this theory for us old people. It’s Biblical. It’s anonymous, by the way, a friend of mine who arrived at 70 a few years ago gave it to me with the title, “How Did I get Here So Fast?” It’s about King Solomon and King David.

King Solomon and King David lived very merry lives,
With very many concubines and very many wives.
Until old age came creeping, with very many qualms;
Then Solomon wrote the proverbs, and David wrote the Psalms.

I believe I’m emboldened to prophesy a little bit, and what’s happening in California is just the front edge, my friends. These big sprawling cities. I won’t even mention their names, you know them, you don’t live there, I hope, none of you. We fled Phoenix a while back when it was succeeding in trying to be another Los Angeles. But they’re in deep trouble. Not just electricity – energy, water, having dependence on the automobile, all of this. The healthy part of the national tissue is small town America. Small communities. The rural areas of the country. I’m making that as sort of a prediction here today.

And I think all of you at this Gathering, despite the quarrels about grazing, may have more of the respect of the nation, and may get more as we go down the road, because they respect your love of the land, your love of animals, the tenacity, the character that has kept you on the land. They like your thrift. Which is sort of another forgotten word in this society we live in.

Well, I’m going to conclude with a poem that I wrote. Our great grandparents included people that some of you would know if I mentioned names, came into the Great Basin. They were in this first wave of settlers. Most of them Brigham Young sent south, which my friend Juanita Brooks, the historian, said was a kind of Siberia. But they went, and they stayed there. And there, in that area, happened what Wallace Stegner, a historian, said – and I knew it was true before he said it – was the greatest tragedy in the western history. The Mountain Meadows Massacre.

My middle name is Lee. My great grandfather was involved. A group of pioneers, the majority women and children, were going from Arkansas to California, and they had 600 head of cattle that they were driving. And though events that even now you find it hard to explain – stupidity, zealotry, paranoia, God-knows-what – there was a massacre. The little kids were saved, they were sent back. And it became known to the families in Arkansas. There was an enmity there that was hard to believe.

A little over ten years ago, two men, one from my family and one from an Arkansas family, began talking. And then they got meetings going. The people who were massacred had been buried in shallow graves. Nothing had ever been done. And I got involved in this. I think there’s never been an event like this in the West. We finally decided, if we put aside all accusations, if we expressed forgiveness, that we could come together and have a ceremony. So we gathered. After 137 years, we gathered, we privately met. There was a ceremony, the president of the Mormon Church, bless him, came. And we had what amounted to a burial ceremony. There’s a monument erected with the names down near St. George, Utah. Go by and see it sometime if you’re interested.

And I described it in a verse that I wrote because this had haunted southern Utah, still does, perhaps. It had haunted my family, I can tell you. So I described in my own effort – poetic words – how this happened. And I close with these words:

Now the families come
Arm in arm,
To share a burial ceremony.
The balm they bring is love:
The only ointment God offers
To heal unhealable wounds.

Thank-you.