J. Willard Marriott - Trip up Mountains

We ran into a brown bear with two cubs. Mother bears are very protective of their cubs and when they are in any danger whatsoever, they will attack a horse or a man or anything that may be threatening her cubs. In this instance, one of her cubs ran up a tree and the other ran down in the woods and she stayed to protect her cub. I shot her and the cub out of the tree. Then we heard the father bear down in the tall timber walking up and down but we didn't go looking for him because we felt we might run into trouble. We loaded the mother bear and the cub onto the horses and took them down to the camp and finally on down to Ogden to the meat market. They put the cub in the window at the meat market and took pictures of me with the cub and it was the first time I had my picture in the paper.

Going to the mountains was, as I have indicated, a reward for thinning the sugar beets, hoeing, weeding and cultivating them, as well as watering them. When most of the work was done during the early summer, then we would take the trip to the mountains. It was a long trip in a wagon with two horses, but some thing that all of us kids really looked forward to. Every time I think of, the experiences I had on those trips I wish I could take another one.

This was the same country where my father ran sheep later, and it was close to the headwaters of the south fork of the Ogden River. Up in this area, there was a tremendous spring that came right out of the mountain - a big gush of water that provided a creek that ran down into the main river. It was up in this area where my father left me one summer with a Basco and a herd of sheep, along with a couple of mules as pack animals and a couple of riding horses, two dogs, a tent and some groceries. We went up as soon as school was out around the first of June. My shoes were worn out then and my father said, "well, I'll bring you some more shoes," because there were holes in the soles, but he didn't show up for about a month and a half. All during that time I was walking close to rattle snakes, because this was called rattle snake mountain. We moved our teepee about every four days so the sheep would get new pasture. One time we pitched our tent on top of a ridge in the pine tree country and I laid my sleeping bag out and the next morning when I got up and rolled up my sleeping bag, there was a large rattle snake that had come out of his hole and slept underneath me because it was warm, I suppose, since it is cold up here at night. I got my revolver and killed him. He had 14 rattles on him. This country was infested with rattle snakes. Later on with herds of sheep coming up there, a lot of the rattlers were killed because the sheep would kill the rattlers ... stomp them to death. However, one time I did have an experience with a rattler. This was a few years later when I was probably 16 years old.- I was riding with five other cowboys, on our way to round up some cattle and they were all chewing tobacco. I had never chewed tobacco ... never had any desire to, but it looked pretty enticing: when they would bite off a chew and they handed it to me and said try a chew, it's very good. Well, I bit off a chew and as we were riding along a rattler buzzed my horse from the side of the road. My horse jumped all the way across the road and I swallowed the tobacco. I was terribly sick and had to go back to camp. That was the last chew of tobacco I ever had.
I spent several summers up in this country which is called the Wasatch Mountain country, the head of South Fork and also Beaver Canyon, where we ran sheep and cattle at one time. It was a long trail down to the winter range. We would take the sheep down from the South Fork country in September and trail them about 50 to 75 miles out to the Utah-Nevada desert. At that time the roads were not all paved and the dust was so thick you could hardly see the sheep at times. It was a long, arduous trip, but the sheep grazed in the desert country all during the winter until lambing time in April.

I had some hazardous trips on the Nevada and Utah deserts. One winter, my father put me on the train and told me to take some supplies out to the herd which was at Monument, Utah. It was a peninsula that went out from the railroad track south for several miles and there was a range of mountains along this peninsula. There was not a house on the peninsula. Nothing but a little log cabin close to where the train stopped. This was a log cabin that had been used by an old miner several years ago and of course was now partly fallen down. There was at least two feet of snow on the ground. The train stopped and the conductor let me off, threw my provisions off the side of the train, then I walked about five miles, arriving just at dark at the sheep camp. I had never been there before, but my father told me where to go and I did finally run into the sheep camp. It was just turning, dark and I could see the light of the camp and the dogs started barking when I got close. The next day, the herder decided to drive back to the railroad station and pick up the provisions and leave me and let me catch the train back to Ogden. After getting his provisions, he left me there to wait for the train but unfortunately, though I didn't know it, I had just missed the train, so I was forced to stay in this little cabin over night and wait for the train the next day. There was a stove in the cabin, I started a fire and I had a little food with me and a shot gun, so I made myself quite comfortable. It was a lonely place and there was a full moon that night and after I had eaten the little dinner I had cooked, I heard the coyotes begin to yelp and then they came around the camp it sounded like there were dozens of them, yelping at the top of their voices. A coyote yelp out in the desert, in the moonlight, with no one around for miles and miles is quite a weird situation for a young boy, 15 or 16 years of age. The coyotes came so close to camp that night I got up and opened the door and shot at them. They finally disbursed but I didn't get much sleep. The next morning I got out and waited for the train to come and I took my coat off and waived at the engineer and he stopped the train and it was certainly a great relief to get on that train and be on my way back to Ogden.

I had another experience out in the Nevada desert. This occurred two years after I came off my mission when I was about 23 years of age. My father purchased a herd of sheep, about three thousand at Elko, Nevada and had them trailed to Cherry Creek, Nevada, where I was sent to receive them, and trail them in to north of the Great Salt Lake, which was a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles and have them there in the spring.

I was attending the University of Utah at the time and I stayed out of school to take this trip and bring in the sheep. I thought it would be quite an experience living with two Bascos all winter and it would give me a chance to do a lot of reading and do a lot of things that I had heard the sheep herders talk about out on the winter range. The sheep had to live on a little bud grass and blue sage and depend on the snow for water. If it didn't snow, the sheep would, of course, get very thirsty and be hard to manage. IN the meantime we melted snow on the mountain tops and carried the water to camp. Fortunately, it did snow eventually and took care of that situation. Cherry Creek, where we received the sheep and the two Basques who were from the Basque
country in Spain, who come over here and stay for a few years and save up enough money herding sheep to go back and live pretty well in their own country for the rest of their lives. Few of them could speak any English, so I had difficulty in communicating, but I did have a little machine that played a record in Spanish and English which was supposed to teach you how to speak Spanish so I learned this and learned how to speak Spanish so I could communicate with these, two young men. Our equipment consisted of a sheep camp, two buckboards (wagons), three riding horses and saddles, three sheep dogs a few rifles and a load of provisions. After leaving Cheery Creek, which was just a stop along the railroad, which consisted of two Basco rooming houses, and one grocery store, a place just for the Bascos to come once in awhile and get provisions and go back to the herds. After we had traveled considerable distance, I found I was required to drive 15 to 20 miles in a buckboard with two horses in blizzards and all kinds of severe weather to get provisions at Cherry Creek. On one occasion I tied my horses up by the grocery store right next to the railroad track. I guess my horses had never seen a train before because on this occasion a train came from Ely, Nevada, going up toward Wendover, Utah. As it came around the bend it whistled a shrill whistle, my horses broke loose and ran up the side of the mountain with their wagon, as fast as they could run. I thought sure they would smash my wagon to pieces but a little Basco woman ran out of her house with her apron and flagged the horses down and saved my wagon. I don't know how I would have ever gotten back with the provisions if they had broken my wagon up. That night, I stayed at one of the two boarding houses and there was no one there but Bascos ... maybe 10 in the house I was in and one miner, an American, a big giant of a fellow. After dinner we sat around a big table and played cards and drinking wine. I neither played cards nor did I drink wire, but each of them would buy a glass of wine and take turns and after they had been doing this for about an hour, they got a little tipsy. The big miner got mad at me because I would not participate with them, so he jumped up and said you little (I weighed 130 lbs) white-haired S.O.B., I'm gonna break you to pieces. So he started for me and I picked up a chair to hit him over the head with but five of the Bascos jumped up and grabbed him while I ran out the back door and went over to the other boarding house and stayed there for the night. The next time I came into town, I brought one of the Bascos with me. He was a little short, very athletic guy, quick as a person could be and as we walked into the grocery store, who was the first man we ran into but this big miner. He started making nasty remarks to me, telling me I was too good to drink with him and associate with him, etc., and started shoving me around, so my sheep herder friend said come on outside if you want something, and you know, that big miner wouldn't go out with him! He was a real coward, when it came to picking on someone who was big enough to handle him. These trips to get provisions were sometimes real serious trips. Occasionally, when we got too far away from Cherry Creek (we would travel about 4 miles every other day and let the sheep just graze) ...we would have to go to the railroad track when we knew our provisions were coming and flag the train to a stop and they would throw our provisions off in the middle of the desert and that's the way we would get supplies. On one occasion, I had to ride 75 miles on horseback around a whole range of mountains to decide which side of the mountain we should take our sheep to get the most feed. There was no place to stay except in a tee pee with a sheep herder or in a sheep camp. So one day I rode by a sheep camp about noon and the middle of the afternoon I ran into a herd of wild horses. My dog started chasing the wild horses and he didn't come back, so I went to look for him and try to find him but I never did. I lost so much time but I continued on riding and when it became dark I couldn't see any lights anywhere, so I turned around in the dark and rode back until about 12 o'clock at night to the sheep camp that I had passed at noon, and these hospitable men, there were three of them sleeping in one bed, got up and cooked me something to eat and then they all turned around in the bed and we slept four in the bed the rest of the night. Of course, I was so tired, I could have slept anywhere, but at least it was fairly warm-in the sheep camp. Those sheep herders had a big heart. I went on my way the next day, traveled for about five days longer to get around this mountain and back to where my sheep were. That was probably the longest ride I have ever had on a horse and the coldest and the most dangerous one because there was not a person for 100 miles except the sheep herders and I ran into them only occasionally.

One time our sheep ran into a poison pool of water and it killed 100 of them. We always had trouble with the coyotes getting into the herd as well as mountain lions. I don't know of anyplace where a person has to depend on their ingenuity more than traveling with a herd of sheep in the desert.

After 6 months we arrived at our spring lambing ground at the north end of Great Salt Lake - 6 months - great months spent in the desert. I read and studied all of Emerson's Essays and a lot of books and magazines including religious books. The 5 standard works of my LDS church.

My first night home in Marriott Settlement was the middle of May. I returned to the herd to complete lambing and help drive the sheep to the mountains to the summer ranges. From there I left for another summer in California and Oregon selling woolen goods.