Editors Note: This article was originally published in the Nov. 1, 2023 issue of the Chronicle Progress. Some information may be outdated.
Deseret and Oasis may not hold the imagination that a Dodge City or Tombstone do for Old West story lovers, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t fantastic tales still to tell.
One local couple proved as much with the recent publication of a small book about the old freighters of Deseret—the weathered hands and local merchants who helped feed the mines and miners of the West Desert area more than a century ago and transported what today would be worth millions of dollars in ore back to the train depot in Oasis, its destination a smelter in Murray.
The book, self-published and simply titled “A Story of Freighters From the Deseret Utah Area To Fish Springs Mines,” is a 75-page compilation of vignettes and photos from the bygone era, written by Hinckley husband and wife, Waldo and Karolyn Warnick.
The book includes all manner of old-timer recollections, family histories, newspaper accounts and more.
The origins of West Desert mines and the camps that bloomed in the desert near them introduces readers to the subject. The book then dives deep into who the Deseret freighters were and the hard conditions in which they worked. The Warnicks also salted their tome with numerous nuanced tales, flavoring the overall work with stories of true Old West mythos—tragedy, intrigue and riches.
Waldo said he didn’t anticipate when he started the book to write so much, mostly because he didn’t think there was much information to discover.
“I thought it would take me about five days, four or five pages. It took us about eight or nine months. We spent a lot of time researching. It was kind of fun, wasn’t it Karolyn?” Waldo asked, sitting in his living room recently, his wife sitting across from him, both with Dell laptops balanced upon their knees.
A personal connection had always made stories of the freighters a fascinating subject for him, he said. In the 1960s, Karolyn’s grandfather, John Henry Western, who lived in Deseret and was among the old time freighters, would often gather his children and family for get-togethers, occasionally sharing his experiences along the old freight route.
“When I kind of joined the family, I kinda liked to just be quiet and listen,” Waldo recalled. “He talked a little bit about freighting. That’s probably where my interest got. I’m interested in the West Desert anyway. I remember him telling us one time about the road going out there to Fish Springs was so wet and muddy they would go up to Antelope and down Death Canyon and on the backside.”
The route itself was long and arduous, taking freighters on a round-trip that could last from 10 to 12 days and nights. The men drove wagons pulled by a few horses at first, eventually driving multiple wagons and teams of horses at a time. The teams were lucky to make 16 or 17 miles a day, typically camping at sites with accessible drinking water along the way.
ALONG A LONELY ROAD
One story in the book is fairly illustrative of the freighters’ experience.
“One time Sam Western and Oscar took a contract to take a ball mill out to Spring Valley, Nevada. It took four wagons, and it took almost all summer to get the job done. There were eight horses on each wagon. One time going down Death Canyon from Antelope Springs and out on the big old flat it stormed, and it rained, and they sunk their wagons to the axles with the weight that was on them. They each took their best team and rode up the canyon to Sinbad and cut two great big pine poles and drug em down and jacked those wagons up and slid the poles in and put sixteen head of horses on and skidded those wagons across that mud one at a time until they got out of the mud,” one account reads.
Another account in the book comes from Marion L. Bishop, who wrote his life story.
“Dad would make the trip in about ten or twelve days. He would have to haul enough baled hay and grain to feed the horses. That meant they would have to leave the horse feed at each campground to come back to.
“His first day’s drive was the smelter (Smelter Knoll). That was about nine miles west of our ranch. (It is seventeen miles from Deseret) This smelter was built by Grandad, Daniel Stiles Cahoon, and his sons. The source of water was a well dug about seventy-five to one hundred feet deep. The water had to be pulled up by a horse, one barrel at a time. The smelter was never used long.
“The next night they would camp at Drum or Joy as it was called. Mary Laird kept a few groceries and run a saloon. The next night, No. 3 was Cane Springs, then the John Thomas Ranch and Big Springs, then around the point of the mountain and back up the hill to the mines.
“At the Fish Springs (Mines) Campground was a saloon, boarding house, commissary, and office buildings. Dick Sutton and Charles Crismon were the bosses and Madam Killkusty (Katie Kulkowski) run the saloon,” Bishop’s account reads.
DEATHS IN THE DESERT
No doubt the freighters witnessed their fair share of tragedy through the years, as the miners most certainly did. The Warnicks capture some of those stories, too.
A Deseret Evening News item from 1903 was one example. It recounted how a man named Virgil Kelly was loading bailed hay—quite probably to feed horses along the Deseret to Fish Springs route—with a young boy. The boy was working with a hay hook above the older man’s head when he fell.
“Mr. Kelly looked up at the falling boy and was struck squarely in the mouth by the point of the hay hook which passed through his tongue and came out under his chin.
“He was taken to Nephi and placed under the care of Dr. Steele and it took him some nineteen hours to dress the wound…From last reports no serious complications had set in,” the news account told.
Another story in the book recounts the death of a Mexican laborer, who, alongside two other travelers, was heading to Salt Lake City and hitched a ride with one of the Deseret freighters. At one point near the Thomas Ranch, the freighters and their companions decided to take a swim in one of the springs. Tragedy struck when one of the laborers began to drown, slipping out of the hands of a would-be rescuer and falling into 20 feet of water.
“So, we went over to the Thomas Ranch and got Thomas who was the officer out there for the mine company. We took a garden rake and put a light chain on it and put a loop in it,” according to a story told by John Martin Cahoon and recorded by relatives, who shared it with the Warnicks. “We hooked a rope to the handle of the garden rake. We threw it in the water and worked it around his feet and pulled it up to where his knees were and fetched him right up to the top.”
The dead laborer was buried right there at the Utah Mine.
The Warnicks’ book also shares the tale of another desert burial. This one much spookier than the last.
The couple recounts a story about how Deadman Springs, located just north of Fish Springs, got its name— Waldo had originally believed it was named for the drowning incident. But long before the Deseret freighters began making tracks in the area, Lt. Col. Edward Jennings Steptoe sent a scouting party to determine if there was a quick route from the area to California. It was 1854 and the scouts failed to find a usable route.
“On their return trip, they passed by the northern end of the Fish Springs Range. When they approached these springs, they were shocked to find mummified corpses standing upright in the springs about a foot and a half below the surface of the clear water.
“Turns out it was a custom of the local Indians to sometimes bury their dead in the springs by weighing their feet down with rocks so it would appear that they were standing up,” according to a 2022 story in the Tooele Transcript Bulletin by Neil Gaiman.
Sam Western, known as Freighter Sam, is seen here next to his draft horses. Freighter Sam hauled cargo to mines and ore from them for about 44 years.
ODE TO SOBIQUIN
Serendipity also crept into the Warnicks’ research in strange ways.
Though their book deals very little with the local Native Americans who lived near the mines and Fish Springs in the late 1800s and early 1900s, one story they recount struck a major chord with Waldo.
In their research they came across the story of a freighter who would occasionally travel as far as Deep Creek, a 15-day trip. The freighter would often sleep near an Indian camp. One of the natives felt bad for the solitary freighter and befriended him, keeping him company when he would venture into the area.
“[T]he Indians became very friendly with him and one old Indian named Sobiquin would come and stay with him, as he felt sorry for him and did not want him to be alone. This Indian gave him the name of Muggins, by which he was known to the Indians. They took such a liking to him that when they thought it was time for him to come, they would come to meet him,” an online family history for one-time Deseret freighter Joshua Rudd Bennett recounts.
When Waldo and Karolyn stumbled on the story, Waldo immediately recognized the name Sobiquin. He was the man Waldo’s grandmother, Grace Cropper Warnick, used to tell a story about from her own youth—a time when children were often told that if they didn’t behave their parents would “give you away to the Indians.”
Grace was the daughter of Leigh Richmond and Fannie Powell Cropper. They lived and farmed west and a little south of Deseret in an area known as the Bogs. When she was 8 years old, a group of Indians, including Sobiquin, stopped by the Cropper home, which was not far from where the Indians would sometimes stay, hunt and fish. Grace’s older brother told the Indians, jokingly, they could have the little girl. And Sobiquin grabbed her up and pretended to make off with her. When Grace was 66 years old in 1947, she spotted Sobiquin in a photo published in the Chronicle Progress. She scribbled a note above the newspaper photo and said the experience haunted her all her years. Waldo found it when his father died in 2001.
And Sobiquin came back into his family’s life when he commenced to researching the Deseret freighters.
“So all those years later, he shows up out there at Fish Springs. He’s the one that grabbed grandma,” Waldo exclaimed. “It blew my mind that he shows up out there.”
A 1947 newspaper clipping from the Chronicle shows a group of area Native Americans. A note scrawled at the top by Waldo’s grandmother points out Sobiquin among the group.
THE ‘MIRACLE’ LEDGERS
Waldo says it was another Cropper that really changed the trajectory of his and Karolyn’s research. It, too, was a bit of serendipity, with a splash of divine intervention to hear Waldo tell it.
One question kept coming up in the Warnicks’ research—how much were the freighters paid and how? Waldo somewhat knew they were paid based on the tonnage of ore freighted out of the mines, but little else.
That changed when he learned of the existence of leather-bound ledgers dating back to the time and in the possession of area-native, now a Las Vegas resident, Kelly Cropper.
The Warnicks learned of the ledgers when Cropper donated a seven-leaf table to the Deseret Heritage Association. The table was passed down to him, but he recalled helping his grandmother retrieve it from a family home when he was a 15-year-old boy, Waldo says.
Cropper helped his grandmother dismantle the table and carry it out of a two-story house, along the way grabbing two leather-bound books his grandmother thought might be thrown away. Cropper kept those books from childhood.
“And Kelly Cropper had those two books, he liked them, for 54 years,” Waldo recalled, noting Cropper let he and Karolyn keep them for a time as part of their research.
With books in hand, the Warnicks not only learned how freighters were paid, but how much and what they purchased to deliver to the mines.
Waldo also discovered the names of 40 more freighters he’d never heard about. He called it a “miracle.”
“It was a miracle. There is no question about it. The Lord wanted somebody’s name tied to something going in. We just had names and nothing else. I know that was a miracle,” he said.
Waldo and Karolyn said their mission with the freighters book was to preserve local heritage and share family memories before they could disappear.
“It tells the story of some of the struggles of the development of this area,” Waldo added.
Asked if there are any other projects he’d like to tackle, he said he’d like to write “a little bit” about the smelters that are out in the West Desert.
“It won’t be very long,” he says, as Karolyn struggles to suppress a chuckle or two at her husband’s promise. “It won’t,” Waldo assures her.
Hard copies of the Warnicks’ book on the Deseret freighters can be purchased at the Chronicle Progress office in Delta for $15.
