The Bears Ears by David Roberts

Author:David Roberts [Roberts, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Texas cowboys from the big outfits became famous for upsetting peaceful dances at Bluff or Monticello. On more than one occasion a wild bunch from the Carlisle headquarters rode into town and shot it up in good Hollywood fashion. There were also a number of murders.

Into this volatile frontier mix one day in 1891 rode an eighteen-year-old adventurer from Salina, Utah, called J. A. (Al) Scorup. As Scorup’s nephew Grant Bayles, born in Bluff and raised in Blanding, recalled in 1971:

When he was just a kid . . . , he came to San Juan and he came the hard way. He came alone and he crossed the Colorado River with a pack horse. Not very many fellows would do that, but I guess he was coming over to see his sweetheart. She had come to Bluff in the Eighties with a group who came through the Hole-in-the-Rock.

Grant Bayles’s recollection raises some problems. Al Scorup would marry in 1895, when he took Emma Theodora Bayles as his bride. She is not listed on the roster of Hole-in-the-Rockers, though her brother Hanson Bayles is. On his first visit to Bluff, Al spent a night at Bayles’s rooming house, where he met Emma, who was cooking for the boarders. (Presumably she had emigrated to the outpost on the San Juan sometime after 1880.) It was love at first sight, at least on Emma’s part, if family history can be trusted. “He was very attractive,” Emma later told her sister-in-law. “All the eligible girls wanted him, but I said to myself, ‘that nice-looking Mormon cowboy was meant for me and I mean to get him.’ ”

On that first jaunt out of his hometown of Salina, Al Scorup forded the Colorado at Dandy Crossing, a relatively broad, shallow stretch of river first used by ranchers and miners in the late 1870s (and by Indians before them). Today’s derelict Hite Marina, where State Highway 95 crosses the Colorado, spans the old ford. As soon as he reached the eastern bank, Scorup smelled opportunity. “He saw lots of grass,” Grant Bayles remembered, “lots of grass and not very many stock. He got the idea then that that’s where he wanted to go into business. It was grass that makes meat.”

By 1891 there were quite a few cattle running loose in the canyons between the Colorado River and Bluff, but left untended, they wandered off into obscure slots and slickrock corners. Owning not a single cow himself, Scorup made a deal with Claude Sanford, a rancher and neighbor from Salina, some of whose longhorns had gone feral in that far-off wilderness. If Scorup “could find the cattle in the maze of cracks, washes, and cliffs that split and hedged the country,” he could keep a third of the calves.

Grant Bayles conjures up the dogged discipline his uncle applied to the job.

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