USA > New Hampshire > Sullivan County > Goshen > History of Goshen, New Hampshire : settled, 1769, incorporated, 1791 > Part 23
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*Ibid.
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HISTORY OF GOSHEN, N. H.
From a survey of a boundary between Wisconsin and Michi- gan in 1841, Gunnison was engaged for the ensuing seven years in extensive surveys of the coasts of Lakes Michigan and Erie. Summers were spent in the field and the winters, at Buffalo, or later, Milwaukee, were occupied with drawing maps from their surveys of the preceding months. Sometimes his family was with him. His promotion to First Lieutenant, Top'l. Engineers, oc- curred May 9, 1846.
In April, 1849, when expecting to return to Mackinac, he received orders to start at once for St. Louis, Missouri, to join an expedition that was to proceed to Fort Hall in the Rocky Mountains, there to survey a route to the Mormon settlements in the Great Salt Lake valley. Lieutenant Gunnison was ill be- fore leaving St. Louis and when the expedition set out, under command of Capt. Howard Stansbury, he was unable to ride his horse and a bed was provided for him in a great spring- wagon used for carrying their surveying-instruments. However, in the dry air of the west, his malady, which appears to have been of a bilious nature, gradually abated.
By way of Forts Laramie and Bridger, Lieut. Gunnison ar- rived at Salt Lake City on August 23rd., in command of the army train, Capt. Stansbury being engaged in the reconnoissance of another route. The ensuing weeks were busily spent in the exploration of Utah Lake. Late in November winter closed in with such severity that the party was obliged to return to Salt Lake City to await the coming of spring. Snow fell to a great depth in the mountains, and in many of the canyons it was fifty feet deep .*
The opportunity of studying at first-hand the tenets of the Mormons was too great to be lightly passed over by Gunnison's active mind. The material he gathered that winter was pub- lished by Lippincott & Grambo of Philadelphia, in 1852, under the title: "The Mormons, or Latter Day Saints, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake; a History of Their Rise and Progress, Peculiar Doctrines, Present Condition, and Prospects."+
*Ibid.
+Captain Gunnison said of the Mormons, in his preface :
"Their leaders are students of men and things. They have been schooled in patience, perseverance and self-denial - men of action, tried in various circumstances."
Surely there was nothing here to arouse resentment. Later, however, the government did come into violent collision with the Mormon leaders.
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CAPT. JOHN W. GUNNISON, EXPLORER OF THE WEST
The publication was to come under severe scrutiny in the immediate future, but it must be emphasized that Lieut. Gunni- son gave his subject a candid, yet sympathetic, treatment. As a member of the Episcopal church and a devout Christian, he wrote with sincerity, without harshness.
In the spring of 1850 the Stansbury expedition continued its operations. Being eager to complete the survey before autumn and to return home, the men carried on their work with great energy and perseverance. Although Lieut. Gunnison's health was not fully restored, he conducted a survey of the eastern shore of Great Salt Lake.#
Having completed the work assigned them by late summer of 1850, the expedition left Salt Lake City on August 28th for their return journey, arriving at Fort Leavenworth the 6th. of November. Gunnison took the steamboat to St. Louis, remained there one day, and then hastened to his family who were then residing at Grand Rapids, Mich. With a confidence that was later to be amply rewarded, he had invested his capital there.
In January, 1851, Gunnison was back in Washington, engaged in making maps based on his surveys. The following April he obtained a furlough, partly for the jurpose of visiting his parents and friends in Goshen. It was the first time in nine years, and his last visit to his old home .*
The 31st Congress had made an appropriation of $150,000 for the survey of a railroad route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific. On March 3, 1853, Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, signed an order that the exploration should proceed after the plan proposed by Senator Benton, who had advocated a transcontinental railroad between the 38th and 39th parallels.
Benton brought his powerful influence to bear in favor of the selection of his son-in-law, John C. Fremont, for this important task. But, despite his unquestioned ability, Fremont's known anti-slavery views and a previous court-martial made him unac- ceptable to that staunch southerner, Secretary Davis. By an un-
#See John William Gunnison, p. 27, for graphic description by him of a violent rain, hail and snow storm that overtook them while in a small boat on the Lake.
*Ibid.
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explained coincidence, if coincidence it was, Davis's order for the railroad survey and John W. Gunnison's promotion to the rank of Captain, Topographical Engineers, bear the same date. Although Gunnison lacked Fremont's fame and undisputed knowledge of the far West, he was a conservative where the other was radical, and was older by a year.
Two months had passed when a telegram* from the War Department notified Captain Gunnison that he had been offi- cially detailed to head the party of exploration. He was naturally elated over his assignment and he proceeded, without a mo- ment's delay, to organize his outfit.
"The exploring party, consisting of Captain Gunnison, Lieu- tenant E. G. Beckwith, second in command; R. H. Kern, topo- grapher; Sheppard Homans, astronomer; Dr. James Schiel, sur- geon and geologist; F. Creutzfeldt, botanist; J. A. Snyder, as- sistant topographer, left St. Louis in June, 1853, for the Kansas frontier. On June 20, Captain Morris, with a detachment of thirty soldiers from Fort Leavenworth, joined the expedition as escort. It was a caravan of eighteen wagons, sixteen of which were six-mule vehicles, an ambulance drawn by two horses, which were replaced by four mules when they reached the mountains, and a carriage for the instruments which was pulled by four mules. The route followed was the old Santa Fe Trail along the Arkansas River to Bent's Fort, which was found in ruins. Bent himself had destroyed it the year before; only the adobe walls, with here and there a chimney, were left standing. Thence the company proceeded to the mouth of the Apishpa, from which point they directed their course through the Sangre de Christo Pass into San Luis Park. At Taos ... they obtained a noted guide, Antoine Leroux, by whom they were led into the valley of the Arkansas, and thence by way of Cochetopa Pass into the Gunnison country.
"The land through which they were passing was inspiring in its grandeur and beauty. Now the way led along the bank of a clear stream, between hills clad in pines or decked in quaking aspen, which the frost had tinged with gold. Now the trail
*Dated May 3, 1853. Records of the War Dept.
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CAPT. JOHN W. GUNNISON, EXPLORER OF THE WEST
climbed the summit of a ridge, from which the travelers could see great peaks tipped with the snows of early autumn, and range after range of mountains fading away in the purple dis- tance. .
"Nevertheless it was a trackless wilderness through which they were making their way. It was necessary for Captain Mor- ris and his soldiers to go in advance in order to build a road. Sometimes a path had to be cut out of solid rock; at other times, the thick timber had to be cleared from the way. The wagons, with locked wheels, grated down the steep, stony trails, which were sometimes so oblique that the men had to hold the vehicles with ropes to keep them from overturning. Twelve mules instead of six were necessary many times to draw the heavy loads to the summit of the long slopes.
"Amid such difficulties, the train made its way toward the Elk Mountains. Here in the summer hunting grounds of the Utes, they found an abundance of game. ... Returning south along the stream now named for the explorer, the party followed the river to the deep gorge of the Black Canyon, which the Indians declared to be impassable. Consequently the men broke a road over the mesas south of Sapinero and came out into the Uncompahgre Valley; this Lieutenant Beckwith described as a barren waste fit only for Indians. Following the Grand River and the Spanish trail westward, the explorers examined the country as far as the Sevier River. ... "
Captain Gunnison, elated at his success, wrote:
On reaching this plain a stage is attained which I have so long desired to accomplish: the great mountains have been passed and a new wagon road opened across the continent - a work which was almost unanimously pro- nounced impossible, by the men who know the mountains and this route over them.
The result is, a new mail and military road to Taos, in New Mexico, by way of Fort Massachusetts; which, with a little work on Gunnison's creek and a hill near Taos, will be very direct and easy, with excellent feed and water all the way.
2nd. A road for the southern states to California, and for emigrants who are late in starting from the States.
3d. A military road to, and in command of, the Utah country, passing into
*Extract from a short biography of Captain Gunnison by Dr. Lois Borlund, 1916, Bulletin of Colorado State Normal School.
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the centre of that people at Grand (Colorado) river, from whence radiate trails to all points of the compass.
4th. It is demonstrated that, for a railroad route, it is far inferior to the Middle Central, by Medicine Bow river, and Laramie plains. It passes some thousands of feet higher, and also lower, and is much longer from St. Louis.
To the energy, zeal, and ability of Lieutenant Beckwith, and Brevet Captain Morris, in superintending the working parties and conducting the train, the expedition is greatly indebted. That a road for nearly seven hundred miles should have been made over an untrodden track (except in some places by pack-mules and footmen), through a wilderness all the way, and across five mountain ranges (the Sierra Blanca, San Juan, Uncompahgre, Sandstone, and Wahsatch), and a dry desert of seventy miles between Grand (Colorado) and Green rivers, without deserting one of our nineteen wagons, and leaving but one animal from sickness and one from straying, and this in two and a half months, must be my excuse for speaking highly of all the assistants of this survey .*
After descending the Sevier River to the southern end of the San Pete valley, they continued along the river until they reached the old Spanish road leading to California. Leaving his party in camp, Captain Gunnison continued up the San Pete valley to the settlement of Manti, Utah, where he procured necessary supplies and two guides, the Potter brothers, who were to accompany the expedition to Sevier Lake. He took time there to write his wife the following letter - the last one he ever wrote to her, playfully dating it:
City of Manti, Oct. 18, 1853. My Dear Wife
We have arrived in the vicinity of the Mormons & today I rode some twenty miles with three men to this settlement. We have been very fortu- nate & traversed 700 miles of new country & brought ourselves & teams through safely. We had rain just as we wanted it on the desert and a beau- tiful month since when we approached the last great mountain ranges.
I have to go back to find my camp in the morning & have hired two guides around to Utah from Sevier Lakes. This will take ten or twelve days, & then I shall send for my letters. There is a war between the Mor- mons & the Indians & parties of less than a dozen do not dare to travel. We did not know what a risk we have lately been running until coming here, for I have been riding carelessly in the mountains hunting roads ahead and other curious capers. . .. May the favor of Heaven attend us until the work is accomplished in like manner as heretofore.
It will be impossible to cross back this winter with the Survey. . . . I have hurried hard to escape the awful tedium of this wintering in the moun-
*Reports of Explorations and Surveys, etc., Vol II, p. 70.
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CAPT. JOHN W. GUNNISON, EXPLORER OF THE WEST
tains, as you know, but the route has been longer, harder & more laborious than anticipated. .. .
J. W. Gunnison.
Following the California Road southwestward, the expedition crossed the valley in the big bend of the Sevier River and there encamped to rest their animals after their hard struggles through the mountains.
On October 25, Captain Gunnison, with four companions and an escort of seven soldiers - making twelve in all, it will be noticed, which he had set as a minimum requirement - left the main camp in charge of Lieutenant Beckwith, to explore Sevier Lake, supposed to be about sixteen miles distant. Although the flash of signal fires daily seen in the valley had shown that they were being watched, the men had been traveling so long without molestation in the midst of unfriendly natives that they failed to properly appraise the danger surrounding them. Captain Gunnison had written, "There is a war between the Mormons and Indians" as though voicing the hope that hostilities were to be thus confined. Yet a serious incident had recently happened in the region, of which he had been personally notified by Anson Call of Fillmore, Utah. Various accounts of the episode are upon record, but the facts are substantially thus:
A party of emigrants under command of Thomas Hildreth and two brothers had encamped at Cedar Springs near Fillmore and found themselves beset by a band of Pah-Vants, notorious beggars of the plains, come to seek gifts of food and clothing and permission to remain until moonlight. The Indians claim their band was composed largely of women and young men, "boys" they were called by one witness, yet it is also true that they were armed with bows and arrows and, in view of the highly-dangerous conditions then prevailing, it is not surprising that the Hildreths ordered them to surrender their weapons or depart at once. A scuffle ensued in which one of the emigrants got his hand cut with an arrow-head, whereupon they fired into the clustered savages with rifles, killing several, among them an old chief.
Call kept a journal, in which he wrote:
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"I told him (Captain Gunnison) what had happened and of the excited state of the Indians in consequence. I invited him to rest a while till the Indians became cooled down. At my information he expressed his deep regret, and remarked, "The Indians are sure to have their revenge ...
It is remembered that a premonition of impending disaster pervaded the little surveying party on the morning of their de- parture. Yet confidently the day's journey was described by Captain Gunnison in his journal, written after they had made camp, and quoted by Lieut. E. G. Beckwith (Mumey, p. 157). None but a man intensely enjoying his work could have written as did he:
"I came down the (Sevier) river southwest for nine miles, and then, bearing more west for two miles, concluded to camp, as the water below might prove too salt. The route was through heavy artemisia for five miles, when we came upon more open plains to the nine-mile point, where we met with sloughs alive with geese, ducks, brant, pelicans and gulls. A few hawks were careening in the high wind, and the black-eared and black-tailed rabbits were very numerous in the large artemisia.
"The mountains wore all day their white mantles of snow, and we had squalls from the north, with snow falling on the high mountains on all sides of us. Toward sunset it brightened up a little, and our hunters brought in four ducks of as many different varieties."
In the midst of this peaceful setting no suspicion of tragedy could have entered. Camp was pitched near the willows on the north bank and the customary camp-guard set, each man, includ- ing the commander, taking his turn at this duty throughout the night.
As the men sat at breakfast in the early morning, suddently the startling war cry of the Pah-Utes, or Pah-Vants, rent the stillness, and a volley of rifle-balls and arrows broke from the surrounding willows. All was confusion; the order, "Seize your arms," was scarcely heard. In the general turmoil the captain stepped from his tent, extending both hands in the traditional token of peace, but even in the gesture of friendliness he fell, pierced by fifteen arrows. One man had fallen at the first on- slaught; the rest tried to reach their horses. Only four of the band of explorers escaped. One of these, hours later, spent with exertion and the terror of a run of fourteen miles, reeled into Beckwith's camp and told the tragic story .*
*Narrative in general after Dr. Borlund's account.
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CAPT. JOHN W. GUNNISON, EXPLORER OF THE WEST
Captain Morris, who had been temporarily absent on business connected with the expedition, had meanwhile returned and at once mounted a relief-party, but arrived too late to find their missing comrades before darkness fell. In fear of imminent attack, his men dismounted and, holding their horses' bridles, stood tensely at arms all night, while maintaining a fire at con- siderable risk, to guide possible survivors to safety. Dawn re- vealed the mutilated bodies of seven besides the leader, among them Mr. Kern,* Mr. Creutzfeldt, and Mr. Porter. None had been scalped, but several, including Captain Gunnison, had their arms cut off at the elbows.
News of the massacre was flashed across the country. As its full import was grasped by editors, demands for redress grew. An editorial in The Missouri Republican, Nov. 30, 1853, called upon the United States Government to take action against the Indians:+
WHAT WILL THE GOVERNMENT DO?
We published yesterday a telegraphic dispatch from Independence an- nouncing the massacre of Capt. J. W. Gunnison and part of his command, and the perilous condition of the remainder, surrounded by a savage band of the Utah Indians, under one of their most noted chiefs (Walker). ... The murderers have been in hostile array against the United States for six months past. They have committed inroads on the settlements of Utah territory - had run off property, and killed citizens of that territory. So long as these difficulties were confined to the Mormons, there seemed to be a disposition not to interfere in the war - certainly no troops were ordered in that direction, and it is probable that the Utahs would have been al- lowed to hunt down the Mormons as long as they pleased; but a new aspect is given to the affair by the sacrifice of a Government officer, sent upon important public business, and by the loss, not only of himself and a portion of his men, but also of his surveys, plats, etc. The question comes home to us now, what will the Government do? Will it permit these out- rageous hostilities to go on? Or will it raise a sufficient military force to go and avenge their murder? . .. These Indians must be whipped into good conduct and submission. This cannot be done by the Mormons. .
Although The Republican greatly exaggerated the number of Indians linked to the atrocity - by some claimed to have been
*Richard H. Kern of Philadelphia (was) one of the most valued and promising officers of the country . . . one of the most daring, intelligent, experienced and cultivated pioneers of our vast western wilds. He had several times crossed the continent, and was on Fremont's last ill-fated expedition in which his brother, Benjamin Kern, was killed by hostile Indians . . " St. Louis Evening News. (Mumey, p. 130)
+Ibid, pages 124-125.
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less than fifty - it did serve to focus attention upon the perpe- trators, that they were Indians, and not Mormons, as later charged.
Kanoshe, chief of the Pah-Vants, claimed that the attack had been committed without his knowledge and he at once took measures to secure the stolen property - notes of the almost completed survey, instruments and horses. These he returned to the proper authorities at Fillmore .*
From whence came the charges that the Mormons instigated the massacre? Lieutenant Beckwith declared the charges false, though there were recognized grounds for apprehension by the Mormons that a railroad might follow the survey and bring in elements hostile to their institutions. As previously stated, the observations made by Captain Gunnison in his published work could have given offense to no reasonable follower of the faith. In this view his biographer, Dr. Mumey, agrees and con- cludes that the accusations later hurled at the Mormons after the massacre grew out of correspondence between Mrs. Gunnison, widow of the Captain, and W. W. Drummond, appointed by President Pierce as Associate Justice of the Territorial Court of Utah. Drummond was assuredly not in sympathy with the re- ligious views of the Mormons and is known to have been abusive and sarcastic in his language concerning them, taking a stand shared by the majority of his day. In any case the controversy was regrettable, because it brought added bitterness to many lives.
The house at Goshen Center, two-storied with hip-roof, in which Captain Gunnison passed his boyhood has a splendid natural setting in full view of the encircling mountains, which are heavily wooded to their summits. It is now the home of John and Doris (Nelson) Newman. Painted red, with white trim, it still displays much of the atmosphere of the early nineteenth century. The central hall is wide, with easy staircase, and an up-stairs front-room retains its original plastered wall with painted frescoes done in terra cotta and moss-green by the hand of Alice Gunnison, the Captain's aunt. Alice Gunnison was born
*Borlund.
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CAPT. JOHN W. GUNNISON, EXPLORER OF THE WEST
June 17, 1794, and died Nov. 1, 1843. The down-stairs front rooms are provided with "Indian shutters."
Across the country road from the house, standing close beside the stone wall that borders it, the boy John set out a Balm-of- Gilead tree that by 1853 had grown to full stature. During a storm in the month preceeding the Sevier River tragedy the top of the tree was broken out and sent to the ground. When news of her son's death reached Mrs. Samuel Gunnison it was only natural that she should recall the shattered tree as a pre- monitory omen. The truth is that the Balm of Gilead has a soft, porous fiber and is easily broken. A second tree, sprouting from the first beyond doubt, had grown again before 1891, and again the top was broken out, causing us to question, when the event was retold by our parents, if it could possibly be the original one.
The Captain's lonely grave at Fillmore, Utah, has recently been marked with a suitable stone and a memorial erected to his memory likewise in the city of Gunnison, Colo. In the family cemetery lot at Goshen a descriptive epitaph is inscribed upon the granite shaft that marks the resting-places of his father and mother.
The opinion is growing among historians that Captain John W. Gunnison's name should be included in that heroic group of Western explorers, Zebulon Pike, Stephen H. Long and John C. Fremont.
CHAPTER XXIII Merchants and Tradespeople
Luther Barnes. Cause Célebre
T THE old "Corner Store," the first store in town, was opened by Luther Barnes in 1809-10. The building stood on the high corner formed by the turnpike and the road leading over Willey Hill, a two-storied structure, approximately thirty-five by forty feet in ground-area, the lower floor being occupied by the store, with a "counting room" rearward and living-rooms upstairs.
Barnes* was already a Goshen resident in May, 1809, when, in partnership with Silas Dutton of Hillsboro, a loan of $700 was made to Calvin Farnsworth, tavernkeeper at the Corners, a part of Lot 26 in the 2nd division, as laid out by the proprietors of Lempster, being mortgaged as security. On the following 16th of September Mr. Farnsworth and wife Lydia conveyed title to the property to Dutton and Barnes. Upon this tract, which is said to have adjoined land of William Murdough, the store was built. Three years later Barnes purchased full rights in this property from Dutton, as well as the Simeon Spaulding and Allen Willey properties which had been previously acquired by them. The trading-partnership between the two men may be assumed ended at this time.
That Barnes was a man of great activity in all public matters is attested by the committees upon which he served, in addition to his own wide-flung dealings in real-estate and trade. The
*Rev. Jonathan Barnes, m. Dec. 14, 1774, Abigail Curtis of Sudbury, Mass., b. May 22, 1755, d. Dec. 8, 1838. He d. 1805. Children:
1. William, b. Dec. 26, 1775; d. Aug. 22, 1855.
2. Jonathan, b. March 25, 1778; m. April 4, 1802, Betsey Taggart; d. Apr. 26, 1817.
3. Joseph Curtis, b. April 24, 1780; m. May 4, 1802, Sarah Delaway; d. March 13, 1817.
4. Samuel, b. June 9, 1782; m. Jan. 2, 1805, Nancy Taggart; became Captain of the militia; d. Oct. 21, 1822.
5. Luther, b. Aug. 1, 1784.
6. John, b. Dec. 30, 1786; d. at sea Aug. 21, 1811.
7. Cyrus, b. Jan. 14, 1789; d. Aug. 9, 1818.
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