“We’re going to take a trip up into northern Utah,” he said finally, chewing on an apricot.
I waited for him to elaborate, but he got into his berth without another word and shortly began to snore — the ends of his ample mustache riffling with each exhalation. I pushed a chair into the late-afternoon light and read awhile in Leaves of Grass—the passage beginning “O something pernicious and dread!/ Something far away from a puny and pious life!” I never failed to find a sentiment in Whitman’s book that accorded with my own life and aspirations. I knew people — men and women both — who would open the Holy Bible and stab blindly at the page with a finger to find an answer in times of trouble and crisis. I would use his Leaves, which is, I believe, also a holy book. Doesn’t he say in it about the grass “I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord”?
Jackson woke from his nap, and we sat down to eat at the trestle table where we worked on our negatives and prints. I heated coffee and some corned beef and potatoes on the spirit lamp, filled our mugs, and flung wet gobs of hash into tin bowls. We ate in silence. Finished, Jackson pushed his bowl aside, sipped his coffee, and told me at last what he had in mind.
“I want to photograph a sorry ragtag band of Northern Ute,” he said. “To get the bad taste of Denver millionaires out of my mouth.”
I thought of the heavy woolen underwear and began to worry.
“When?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“If we leave soon, we can get there before the snow piles up in the passes.”
We could have traveled in relative comfort on the Utah Central from Ogden to Salt Lake City, but Jackson wouldn’t hear of it. He was sick of railroads, which, in his opinion, had tamed things, and wanted to surround himself with “the haggard beauty” of the Wasatch Range when the snow began to fall.
“Can’t we go in the spring?”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“I want to see the Indians at their most miserable,” he said.
The Utah Valley, October 1870–April 1871
The Ute gave their name to Utah, and whatever else they had of value (they owned nothing, ownership being an alien concept) — land, timber, artifacts, buffalo, elk, antelope, and deer — Utahans took. So it went anywhere Indians had, by right of prior possession, what emigrants coveted. The taking proved easy; they swarmed over Indian lands, regardless of treaties made with the “white fathers,” and stole or killed what they liked. When the Indians objected, the squatters complained to the newspapers and Congress, and the army herded the Indians onto wastelands to the sentimental drinking tune of “Garry Owen.” If they became indignant and scalped a few settlers or prospectors out of pique, the army retaliated by killing their men, women, and children and the millions of bison the Indians relied on for food, clothing, shelter, and spiritual well-being. Some say there were as many as 75 million buffalo on the Great Plains before we hunted them nearly to extinction to feed railroad workers toiling west, to profit from their bones and hides, to satisfy the itch to kill, and — most important — to annihilate the Lakota and the Cheyenne. Unable to defeat them, the army eventually starved them into submission.
Jackson and I entered the Utah Valley through the Wasatch. Wasatch is Ute for “low pass over high range.” He hadn’t anticipated the quantity of snow fallen already in the mountain passes, and the going was arduous, exhausting us as well as the mules, which found their footing with difficulty on the snow-covered rocks. We spent six days on the crossing, made increasingly nervous by each day’s new snowfall. It was bitter, and the raw wind cut. I recalled the fate of the Donner Party in the Sierra Nevada two decades earlier and wondered how Jackson would taste, stuffed with his dried apricots.
I never doubted I could endure the extremities of weather and terrain. I spent four years living like an animal in mud, rain, snow, and heat. And a tenement in winter or in the dog days is far worse. I’d survived an impoverished childhood and a terrifying war, but trudging through the Wasatch passes took the sand out of me. I felt my backbone melt in the heat of Sisyphean exertion, and — no sooner had it turned to slurry — I’d wince as it froze up once more in the cold. Forlorn, I would spend bitter hours of repentance for having agreed to make a trip for no other reason than to take pictures of the “fish eaters,” the Toompahnahwach Ute wintering in misery on the shore of Utah Lake. Jackson was imperturbable. Not even frostbitten toes could discourage him. He would spend the better part of his life in strange countries, including the one found inside each of us, and never doubt himself or yield to self-pity, the latter a quality predominant in my character.
On the seventh day, we came out of the snow-bandaged mountains and into the valley, near the Mormon settlement at Spanish Fork, about ten miles south of Provo. After resting the mules and giving them a ration of provender, we rode west toward the big lake where the fish eaters had their winter camp.
There were fifty-three Toompahnahwaches — call them Ute, for convenience — living under shabby lice-infested buffalo hides stretched on alder saplings. How lice managed to survive their wretchedness became a theme I returned to often that winter. In my boredom, I’d speculate on the damnedest things: how geese knew when to step up onto the ice before lake water knit up around them; why piss didn’t freeze in our bladders, when we couldn’t lick a metal spoon without our tongues sticking to it; why our stubble didn’t stay, by some kind of natural law, inside our faces, where it would be warmed, at least a little, by our blood — questions of no great import, inspired by the cold. I would have felt sorry for the Indians if I hadn’t been busy feeling sorry for myself. The snow crackled, hissed, and seethed; it twisted, wraithlike, over the white crust when the wind grumbled. What birds we hadn’t eaten shivered on the ridgepole. By the time April came and, with it, the thaw, nine Indians had perished from a variety of ills: children, old people, and a girl. One child was born and survived — a fact I consider miraculous under circumstances that were worse than dire.
Jackson exposed only a dozen negatives that winter. He would prepare the glass plates inside a darkroom tent, warmed by an amber-shaded spirit lamp; but the collodion thickened in the open air and the light grew sluggish as the views of lake and frozen steppe were closed down by falling snow. His hands, chilled to uselessness, would fumble among his glass plates and chemicals like those of a blind man desperate to touch what was familiar. The negatives he did manage were made during the hour or two when the sun seemed to rally with a yellowy light reminiscent of an egg yolk; usually, it looked pale as a pearl on the steely blue or leaden sky above the snow-scabbed lake. That’s a purple passage fit for a novel but hardly descriptive of the actuality of that winter, which was almost past enduring. They were discouraging times even for Jackson.
He was someone used to looking at the world through a lens — it was his eye — and he relied on his instrument to sound the depths of his subject matter, whether it was a formation of rocks or a solitary Indian. Unable to photograph the Ute as often as he’d like that winter, Jackson tried to “see” them without his camera. Two of the old men could speak English and did so with an eloquence that made me think of the King James Bible or Lincoln’s speeches. They’d been civilized by Quakers who had come all the way from Pennsylvania to turn them from heathens into gents. They could read and write and had sent polite letters to Johnson and Grant, asking that the government respect its treaties and allow the Ute to keep their buffalo herds safe from the hunters paid to slaughter them. Otherwise, there’d be nothing left but roots, bark, and vermin between them and starvation. Naturally, the government ignored them.