It’s getting more difficult to
choose highways out of Tucson that we have yet to travel. Oh, they’re
there all right, but if you are heading northwest you have to go at
least an hour out of the way to travel them.
We have to go to Salt Lake City
for the umpteenth time—but this one is special. The trunk of our
Town Car, about the size of Mammoth Cave, is chock full of books, most
of them The Lincoln Highway: Utah, my eighteenth. This is the
fourth book of a series, the first three covering the states of Iowa,
Nebraska, and Wyoming.
For the first time I have a
co-author, Jesse G. Petersen, of Tooele, Utah. Jess, now the treasurer
of the Lincoln Highway Association, had published a book of maps of
the Lincoln Highway through Utah, and let the Utah Chapter of the
LHA
bank the proceeds. Aware of the agony involved in researching the
incredibly complicated paths taken by the highway through his state,
and aware that Jess had done it better than anyone else could have in
his own book, we asked him if he would be willing to be listed as a
co-author in this one. He said, "Sure, as long as I don’t have
to pay for it."
Well, that was a given, as was
his approval. He knew that his stuff would be swiped had he not said
yes.
So now it was time to get some of
the money back, by taking the book on tour of the Beehive State. I had
prepared the usual forty-minute slide show.
So grab the old Rand McNally and
tag along, as we head north for another wonderful adventure in the
American West.
7:11 A.M. Monday, February
17, 2003
Of course we first must dispose
of Kathy’s cats. Butch and Ginger the Spook lodge at the cat hotel,
some fifteen miles east of our west side home. At $22 a day, we’ll
probably be staying in Mom and Pop motels at about the same rate. The
car is gassed up and we head east; then back from the cathouse to
I-10, boarding the westbound superslab from Grant Road.
Less than an hour out we pulled
over to a Burger King at little Arizona City. Coffeed up, we left I-10
in Phoenix for I-17. No more of that Arizona-60 mess for us. We turned
off I-17 at Az-74, heading west to Morristown and Wickenburg. Sixty
miles longer and an hour quicker. Either way it is a dull drive, but
north of Wickenburg the fun begins. US 93 north of there looks awfully
dull on the map, but it isn’t. It is a thrilling road most of the
time. We hit I-40, turned to the west for twenty-four boring miles,
then left it to continue following 93 toward Vegas. The old girl was
thirsty by this time, getting about twenty-five miles to the gallon,
as usual. Not bad for 280,000 miles on the same engine. Texaco this
time.
Traffic inched over Hoover Dam,
picked up in the city. We boarded I-15 in Vegas, headed northeast. The
destination this night was St. George, Utah, just north of the Arizona
line. We made it, no sweat. Checked in at the SingleTree Inn—Kathy
had made reservations a month earlier.
Dusk was approaching, but there
was one place neither of us had seen—a chilling place, known as
Mountain Meadows.
We headed northwest from St. George on Utah 18,
past Veyo, and picked up the directional signs to the site. It isn’t
well marked, but we found the deserted parking area. We could drive no
farther, so we hiked the path uphill about a tenth of a mile to the
markers. In the gathering darkness, we could still see down the valley
to where the Fancher wagons were surrounded in that awful September of
1857. We could look to the right, to follow the path of the
unsuspecting victims, who thought they were being escorted to safety
by the Mormon terrorists. We could almost hear the commands, as the
murderers shoved their victims away, leveled their rifles at them and
killed them at point-blank range.
