Jacob Hamblin Apostle to the Indians

Jacob Hamblin was missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints among the Indian tribes in southern Utah and northern Arizona. He won them by honesty and friendship and he did much to make the frontier West safe for the Mormon people, who came to build homes in the wilderness. THE LITTLE rock fort on the Santa Clara was alive with excitement. From the rooms that lined its walls women hurried back and forth, bringing sacks of biscuits or loaves of salt-risin' bread, dried peaches, dried beans, jerky, and the dozen or so other items which must go to fill the alforjas. Then there was bedding to roll and a change of clothes to crowd in, along with many admonitions. The men, twelve of them, bearded, moccasined, their broad hats pulled low, checked the horse shoes, discussed matters of guns and ammunition and whether to take along more than one Bible and Book of Mormon. This fort with its one-hundred-foot square enclosure, its rock walls twelve feet high and two feet thick, and its line of single rooms along two of the sides, represented the last outpost in Southern Utah. It marked the outer edge of the white man's domain. Clinging to the edge of the desert, the thin streak of cottonwoods which lined the creek was the only bit of green in an infinity of parched desolation. The nearest town was fifty miles to the north; there were no others for well, it took all the elasticity out of the imagination to even try to think how far. This morning, October 28, 1858, most of the men of the fort were leaving to penetrate one section of that unknown land. A little apart from the group, but directing in a quiet way, was the leader, Jacob Hamblin. A slender man with a serious face, he never wasted words, but when he did speak, his men paid attention. As president of the Indian Mission, he could speak with authority, but that was not what gave his words weight so much as THE STORY OF ONE OF THE GREAT FIGURES IN MORMON COLONIZATION OF THE WEST. BY JUANITA BROOKS the knowledge of the unerring insight with which he had handled the Indians. From the time when the Mormons, under Brigham Young, arrived in Utah, they had a deep interest in the Indians. "It is cheaper to feed them than to fight them," Brigham said. In part this grew out of his practical knowledge that if his people were to make permanent homes here it would be safer to have the good will of the natives, and in part to the teachings of the Book of Mormon, which says that the American Indians, or Lamanites, are of Jewish origin, a part of the House of Irsael, and that they shall yet become "a white and delightsome people." Missionaries were sent out with definite instructions to learn their language, cultivate their friendship, and teach them the arts of civilized life. Jacob Hamblin had been one of the first called to the Southern Indian Mission. But work among the Indians was not new to Jacob even then. When he first came to Utah, he settled in the little town of Tooele, thirty-five miles west of Salt Lake City. The Indians had made such a business of driving off the horses and cattle from this town that a posse was organized and sent to punish them. Jacob Hamblin was the leader in one of these raids.

Using some of the native's own tactics, he traveled at night, located their camp, surrounded it, and made the attack just before dawn. As his men rushed toward the tepees, yelling at the top of their voices, the Indians were thrown into utter confusion, women running and screaming, children crying, braves trying to find their places for defense. The sight filled Jacob with such pity that he called for his men to stop. Not for all the cattle in Tooele County could he have led in a slaughter of these people. He went forward to meet the chief. Though neither knew a word of the other's language, they managed to make themselves understood. Jacob persuaded the chief and three of his men to go back with him to the settlements, promising, by many signs and gestures, that they should return in safety. Something about Jacob inspired their confidence-his simplicity, his quietness, his so-evident honesty. They went with him. Back in town it was a different story. The leaders, remembering all the losses they had sustained at the hands of these Indians, were glad to have them brought in! They would kill them without delay. In the Mormon church at that time it was a serious thing to defy the man in authority over you. It might mean to forfeit your membership in the organization. To one who valued his standing in the church as dearer than life itself, this situation offered a real challenge, but Jacob did not falter. "I promised these men protection if they would come with me," he said. "If we kill them it will be over my dead body."

That settled it. The Indians were allowed to return to their people, but there were some of Jacob's neighbors who thought he was over zealous.

Jacob was first and last and all the time a praying man. Every morning before he set out for his day's labor, he kneeled to ask God's guidance; every night before he lay down he asked His approval and protection. And in between, if ever a problem presented itself, he took it to his Father in Heaven, almost as man to man. The incident of freeing the Indian prisoners contrary to the wishes of his leaders lay heavily on his mind. He prayed about it.

Then while he was in the mountains alone, his answer came. Whether it was the long day, from the miracle of the dawn to the splendor of the sunset, or the twilight hours over his small fire, or the nights under the friendly stars—when it came, he never said. In fact, he never talked much about it, for it was not a thing to put into words. It came as a great spiritual illumination, bringing consecration and peace. Into his soul was borne the message as clearly as though he had heard the words spoken, “Inasmuch as you do not thirst for the blood of the Indians, they shall not have the power to take your life.” Whatever it was, to him it was Reality. One of the Eternal Verities. A promise from Him whose promises fail not. On the strength of it, he was to move unafraid among the Indians until the belief grew up, even among them, that he bore a charmed life.

This assurance that he was to be a messenger of peace to the Lamanites came to him in 1853. The next year he was officially called to the Southern Indian Mission and settled at Santa Clara, and in the four years following he had gained such influence with the natives that they trusted him implicitly, taking his word as law. Now, in October, 1858, he had organized this group to visit the tribes across the Colorado River, in what later became Arizona. From those who lived on his side of the Grand Canyon he had learned of the great gorge which slashes its way along, impassable even to this day for more than two hundred miles. To reach the tribes almost due south of him he must travel far to the southeast to cross the stream and then back again toward the southwest, like the point of a triangle. He had heard that these Indians were peaceable and that they practiced the arts of agriculture, weaving, and pottery making. He would visit them to carry his gospel of Christianity to them.

The pack horses were finally loaded and driven ahead by the Indian boy, Naraguts, while the men followed horseback, single file or by twos. They traveled over broken country, across lava flows, through swales filled with mesquite brush and arrow-weeds, up onto a broad tableland where there was no sign of water or grass, but only flat-topped buttes rising to form a second elevation, the base of each flaring out in strips of vermilion and salmon and gray with many a rise and fall, like the billowing, striped skirts of a dancing gypsy. They camped one night at a fine spring surrounded by cottonwoods, which they named Pipe Spring, and which became a familiar base from which they could take off and a haven to which they could return. On beyond this, past what is now Kanab, over Buckskin Mountain with its pine tree sentinels, and down into desert country again, trying to find a way to the river without too many abrupt plunges and impassable cliff walls. They picked their way around the head of arroyos whose sudden banks dropped straight down, across gullies, over rocks, down and down along narrow clinging-on-paths at the base of sheer cliffs, and tortuous, twisting trails. Ten days after leaving home they came to the water's edge. This was the “Crossing of the Fathers,” or El Vado de los Padres.

Twelve men on a river bank, behind them a faint trail, before them a stream dark and deep, menacing in its very silence. Across on the other side banks stark and barren, more difficult of ascent than the ones over which they had come. Did it occur to them that they were making history? They were the first white men to cross this stream since Father Escalante had braved it back in 1776.

They improvised a raft of poles and began transporting their saddles and supplies across, taking also an extra man or two at each trip. When they had the men about equally divided on each bank, they drove the horses into the stream, with much encouragement by whip and voice. The Indian boy rode the lead horse, and when it got into the deep water he slipped easily back over it and hung to its tail, all the while calling out encouragement to the animals around him.

On the opposite bank they re-packed and set themselves about getting up out of the canyon. The rocks, washed slick by the rains of agespetrified sand dunes, one man called them— gave poor footing for the horses. Up and up they struggled in a thin line, a few specks in an eternity of waste. If there is any place on the whole earth designed to make men conscious of the fleeting nature of his existence, it is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Here man is at hand's grip with the elements, and the elements always set to win. In proof, here were the niches cut by Escalante nearly a hundred years before as clear as if it had been only yesterday.

Once out of the canyon, they turned to the southwest, into desert country again, with the same colorful buttes with the same fluted, flaring skirts to the north and east. Then they came to clay land dotted with knolls, rounded off so though earth giants had dropped balls that flattened as they fell and stood yet as barren as when they were formed, numberless, without character. There was no sign of life, hardly a snake or lizard even, not even the swarms of little grasshoppers that so often inhabit the scrub brush of the desert.

For days they traveled. They passed the dun-colored sands of the Moencopi, dry at this season, on to country that stretched its arid lengths in every direction. Their supplies were getting low, so they tried to content themselves with a little jerky sliced paper-thin and chewed to a liquid, a bit of parched corn, some dried peaches. Without water there was nothing to cook and no reason for making a fire. Besides, they were in Navajo country, and not sure of the disposition of the natives.

Finally they came upon signs of human beings, a place where some sheep had been bedded down for the night, the moccasined track of a man who had evidently had charge of them. A little spring farther on brought eager cups under its drip before they noticed that it had been husbanded and turned to a tiny garden terraced against the hill. The crops had all been gathered, but one squash below the terrace had escaped notice. How hungrily the men snatched it up! How hastily they made a fire to cook it. How greedily they ate one small squash for twelve men.

They all declared that it must be a new variety, it was so much sweeter than the ones they raised on the Santa Clara, another proof of the old adage that “hunger is the best sauce.” A few miles further on they came to one of the Hopi villages, a community of cliff houses on top of a rugged mesa. From afar the Indian guards had sighted their approaching dust, the alarm had gone out, and the natives were prepared to give battle. But when the missionaries rode up, dusty and travelstained, when all but Jacob remained back and he came forward without the sign of a weapon, their fear gave way to curiosity. Jacob was taken to the chief, where his friendly attitude and complete simplicity won confidence at once. The natives, reassured, decided to take the white visitor to their homes for supper.

Jacob climbed the high ladder to the top of of the wall and down another to the reception room of the chief. In the dim, cool interior he found himself taking mental notes of the cement-like substance that covered the floors, of the rugs and blankets, of the fine pottery. Then his hostess brought his supper, a dish of stewed meat and beans, peaches, and some thin corn cakes arranged in groups of sevenseven cakes of white meal, seven of blue, seven of red.

In writing of the supper he said, “The hostess, apparently surmising that I would not know how to partake of the bean soup without a spoon, dexterously thrust her fingers, closed tightly together, into the dish containing it, and with a very rapid motion carried the soup to her mouth. Then she motioned for me to eat. Hunger was pressing and a hint was sufficient.

After the meal, the hostess brushed up any bits or crumbs with a feather duster and then retired that Jacob and the chief might talk. Though neither knew a word of the other's language, they had many signs and motions, and the Indian boy whom Jacob had brought along acted as interpreter.

“Are you not afraid we will kill you?” the chief asked.

“Do you kill your friends?”

“No.”

“Then you will not kill us, for we are your friends.” “Americans have bad hearts,” the chief said.

“You look like Americans. Maybe your heart is good. No Americans can come to our village.” The Mormon missionaries visited all seven of the villages which comprised the Hopi nation, though each village in turn was named and a had a government by itself, such as the Oraibis, the Moquis, and the Zunis. They were very different from the Piutes and Piedes with whom the Mormons had been working, and the missionaries were much interested in their way of life. They noted the economy in the use of wood, the methods of storing rain water; they watched the men and women at their looms and saw their flocks and farms.

When they were ready to leave, Jacob told them that he would visit them again the next year, and asked what he should bring to trade. They told him that they would like machines to help with their work, and he resolved to bring wool cards and sheep shears, spades and hoes, and perhaps some of the dyes which his own people had learned how to use.

Four of the missionaries were appointed to stay among these people to learn their language and further the friendly relations thus begun -William Hamblin, Jacob's younger brother, Thomas Leavitt, his brother-in-law, Andrew

The Mormon People In Arizona

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS is pleased to present in this issue the story of Jacob Hamblin, one of the figures in the history of Mormon colonization of southern Utah and northern Arizona. As missionary to the Indians, this good man, so fervently a believer in the teachings of his religion, made friends with the red men of this region and did more with kindness and patience and truth to pacify them than six companies of U. S. Cavalry could do with bullets.

The Indians trusted Jacob Hamblin. He never betrayed that trust. And by winning their respect and confidence, he did more, perhaps, than any other man to allow the Mormon pioneers to come unmolested into the most rugged and terrifying part of the western frontier.

This is the first of several articles that will appear in these pages on Mormon colonization of Arizona. The story of Arizona could never be properly told unless these chapters were included. These people were among our very earliest settlers. Unlike many others, they did not come for profit and gain, they did not come to exploit a wilderness. They came to build homes and establish an empire of permanency in the west, and find a place where they could live in peace. The colonization of the desert frontier by these hardy and devout people stands as one of the truly heroic accomplishments in the history of migrating peoples. It is an American epic.

Jacob Hamblin was born in Salem, Ashtabula County, Ohio, April 6, 1819. He embraced the Mormon faith as a young man, and he underwent the terrible hardships of his people. He arrived in Salt Lake the first of September, 1850. In reading the story of this man and in further study of the history of the Mormon migration, one must always keep in mind that these people were deeply religious. When they came West, Mormon blood had been shed in many states. The Prophet, Joseph Smith, Jr. was murdered by a mob. They suffered every indignity, were persecuted and bedelived as no minority group has ever been in America. In a country built upon the premise of religious freedom, they were hounded from one place to another, were killed, their property burned. All this they suffered with dignity, their strength coming from their religious beliefs. This zeal and devoutness carried them through the trek from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Salt Lake City, when they marked their trail with the graves of their people who perished along that route. They came West to find a place to worship as they pleased. They settled in a desert wilderness and by dint of hard work, patience and fortitude, and under the direction of a truly great and wise man, President Brigham Young, they conquered a wilderness and the desert came to bloom as a rose.

No sooner had they established themselves in Utah than colonies were sent into Arizona. Jacob Hamblin did much to make these colonies possible. They came to build homes. It was not gold they wanted, only security. In truth, Mormon colonists were among the first to find gold on Sutter's Creek in California, and when President Young was informed of it he ordered his colonists to return to Utah, saying that gold was a blemish and its influence would taint them and lead them from the paths of righteousness.

Popular fiction writers, dealing with the Mormon people, have presented distorted pictures of them. What they accomplished, the beauty they established in the desert wilderness could not have been done except by courageous and hard-working people. In Arizona today some of our finest people are descendants of those early Mormon pioneers. As a tribute to them and as part of our mission in telling the story of our land, ARIZONA HIGHWAYS is proud to tell you something of their history.

Look back into the middle of last century, if you will, for a moment. Wagon trains were crossing an uncharted plateau between Utah and Arizona. A colony of Mormons were coming into this state. They brought with them books to teach their children. Tools to build their homes and plow the ground. And they brought young trees to plant in order to add beauty and comfort to their new homes. As scarce as water was along the way, they managed to keep these trees alive. They brought shade to the shadeless desert, and many, many more fine things. R. C.

To follow Jacob Hamblin's different trips is the work of a volume. He was the first white man to explore northern Arizona; he was the first to go down the Colorado River through the Black and Boulder Canyons in a boat. A few years later Major J. W. Powell followed the same route, but he had Jacob's account in his hands. In fact, Jacob Hamblin was guide on many of Major Powell's trips, being valuable not only for his knowledge of the land, but for his prestige with the Indians.

This is shown when Major Powell met the Indians in the vicinity of Mt. Trumbull in an effort to learn what had happened to three of his men who had climbed out of the canyon near there a year before. He gives a vivid account of the meeting, of the conversations repeated by the interpreter, of the Indians' story of their hardships in this land. "The gravity of the Mormon missionary helped much," Powell admitted. Because Jacob sponsored him, the Indians accepted him, yet after several hours of talk he knew no more about what he had come to learn than he had at the beginning. As the meeting was breaking up, Jacob put a detaining hand on the arm of an Indian, and drawing him quietly to one side, talked in low tones. In a few minutes he came back with all the details.

One story, often re-told, shows why the Indians had gained such confidence in him. When the Navajo came to Kanab to trade, they would stop on a knoll just outside of town, build a smoke, and with a blanket signal that they were there. Then Jacob would go out and invite them in or arrange to trade with them there.

One day he sent his son, Jacob, Jr., out with a pony to exchange for blankets. The boy, eager to make a good bargain, kept demanding more and more, and the Indian gave what he asked without much protest. When he arrived home, pleased with himself as a good trader, his father looked at the blankets and without comment counted out one pile.

"You take these back," he told the boy. "You charged too much for the pony; this is all he was worth."

At the camp, the Indians was evidently expecting him.

"I know you come back," the native said. "Jacob your father? He my father, too."

The one time when Jacob's life was most in peril, when the promise which came to him more than twenty years earlier was put to its severest test, was in 1874, when against all the advice of his friends, he went to the Navajo country to avert an Indian war. The trouble began when four Navajo who had come into the Mormon country to trade had been trapped by a snow storm in Pine Valley Mountain, and being hungry, had killed a calf. The owner, not a Mormon, discovered it, gathered a posse, and attacked the Indians, killing three and wounding the fourth. How this last man ever succeeded in dragging himself over all the hard miles between there and his home across the river will always be one of the mysteries. The sight of him worked the natives to a fever heat. To maintain their honor they must have revenge.

Knowing full well the danger of his mission, Jacob set out alone. Twice Bishop Levi Stewart of Kanab sent a messenger telling him to come back, and twice Jacob refused.

"I have been appointed to this mission by the highest authority of God on the earth," he said. "My life is of small moment when compared to the lives of the Saints and the interests of the Kingdom of God. I am determined to trust in the Lord and go on."

At Moencopi he met a Mr. J. E. Smith and his brother, two men who had lived among the Indians and who were intrigued by Jacob's determination.

At the camp, Jacob was met by coldness and hostility; the one chief whom he had counted on to befriend him was not there. Instead, young warriors stalked about, their feathered war-bonnets bright in the sun, their faces streaked with vivid blue and red paint, put on to emphasize the hardness of their features.

The council was held in a lodge some twelve feet wide by twenty feet long, with a fire in the center. Jacob and his two white friends were seated at the back with twenty-four warriors between them and the only way of escape. The meeting began with a burst of oratory from one of the young chiefs, who brought in the wounded man and with many

JACOB HAMBLIN'S RULES FOR MANAGING THE INDIANS

People often speculated as to how Jacob Hamblin had gained such prestige with the Indians and what methods he had used to so completely win their confidence. In 1874, John W. Young, a son of President Brigham Young, asked him to formulate a set of rules which might be used as instructions to other missionaries. Jacob wrote the following, which seem to be sound psychologically:

gestures told of his sufferings and of the companions whose bodies lay for the wolves to devour.

One after another of the braves arose to speak, the fire-light on their bare brown skin, the silver ornaments, and the colorful headdress, and the painted faces making the scene even more terrifying. With many gestures they told of how this man had told them to come to the Mormon Country to trade, how they had gone in peace, and then had been betrayed. Here was Jacob, who was responsible for it all. What could they devise that would be punishment enough for such treachery?

The Piute boy, sweating with fear, told Jacob the decision to lay his naked body over the coals or to tie him to a tree and build a fire around him. The Americans must witness the torture and then carry word back to the Mormons. Without the quiver of a muscle, Jacob repeated the decision to his white companions. They would help him fight his way out, they told him, if he wanted to try to escape.

"No," he said. "Sit still and say nothing." He had one of those sudden flashes which told him that if he did not make the first move, there would be no move made. "Inasmuch as you do not thirst for the blood of the Indians, they shall not have power to take your life, the Promise had said. He would accept it at face value.

Now it was his turn to speak. In tones so low that they had to lean forward to hear him, he began. "You know that I am your friend. You know that I have never lied to you. I come now to tell you that my people, the Mormons, did not kill your warriors"Again the council went on. Some of the Indians held out for torture, others wanted to turn Jacob loose and then run him down, still others thought they should demand cattle and horses in payment. Whenever it was Jacob's turn to speak, he insisted on the same thingsthat he was their friend; that his people did not kill their warriors. Why should they pay for that which they had not done?

Finally the Indian agreed that if the Mormons would give them four hundred head of cattle, if Jacob would give them a paper promising this, he should have his freedom; otherwise he should be killed. Still he refused. They might kill him, he said, but he would not burden his people with an unjust debt.

After eleven hours, they set him free. He was to take their chief and some of their men back to his country to prove the truth of his words. Thus again was bloodshed averted; thus again was their regard for Jacob Hamblin strengthened.

One interesting story comes from his son, Walter who lives in Kanab.

"I was only a little boy," he says, "eight or nine years old, maybe, and we were traveling down near the line of New Mexico. We had two wagons. Father was driving one ahead, and mother was driving the second one. I was in with mother.

"It was at the time when the Apache were a terror throughout the country. We passed through a Mexican village where all the people had been killed and the houses were only charred posts and piles of ashes. Then we saw a lot of Indians coming toward us on horseback. To my childish eyes it looked like hundreds and hundreds, but as I think of it now, I imagine there was sixty or seventy, maybe. I looked at my mother. She was pale as death. I thought my last day had come, and huddled against her whimpering.

"Father stopped his wagon, so we stopped, too. The two ends of the long line began to encircle the wagon. Father stepped down from the spring-seat to the ground. One Indian rode forward alone, and I heard him cry, 'Jacob.' It was the happiest sound I ever heard. Then they ran toward each other, and were locked in a tight embrace, with their cheeks pressed together, like two brothers that had been separated a long time. It was a band of Navajo on their way back from driving the Apache over the Mexican border, and the chief was the one of whom Jacob was so fond."

So one might go on and on. Jacob Hamblin, with his ideal of friendliness, of fair-dealing and peace, stood between the two ways of life, the Indians and the white, and did more single-handed to bring about a mutual understanding than all the soldiers that ever marched into Arizona. Always on the frontier, he was weakened by exposure and hardship until he died prematurely at the age of sixty-six, as much as martyr to the cause of peace as though he had been killed by a bullet or a poisoned arrow. He was so faithful to his calling that he truly deserved the title of "Apostle to the Lamanites" which Bringham Young gave him on December 15, 1876.