End of the Trail

Joe B Chiles and the rest of the party reveled in the warmth of foothills with their lower elevations. Overnight they had gone from eating wolf guts to roasting antelope steaks, and from hopeless desperation in the cold trackless mountains to an optimistic feeling that their journey was almost at an end. Cheyenne Dawson, who had been almost forced to his knees from thirst and hunger, rejoiced with the others. “…and we decided to tarry, kill and eat…Bidwell says there were 13 deer killed and eaten, [by 32 people] and as we remained there only two or three days, there must have been some tall eating.”  Vegetarians, look away now.

The first night in the valley of the Stanislaus River they gorged on as much deer and antelope as they could, overcome to the point of tears with relief and delight as they ate their fill. Wild grapes still hung on their vines, sweet and thirst-quenching. After almost seven months on the trail, the first party of American settlers to cross the continent was in sight of their goal. 

The next day the Bartleson group remained in camp to dress the meat that they had killed the day before while the rest of the party set off down the river. As they followed the watercourse they were startled by the sudden appearance of Thomas Jones, one of the hunters who had been gone for just over a week. He explained that he had descended from the mountains looking for game a few days before the main party and by the greatest stroke of good fortune had run into an Indian whose one word of English was, ‘Marsh,Marsh’.  

John Marsh, dressed up for the photographer

 The Indian had indeed been sent out by John Marsh, who had heard that a party of fellow Missourians was struggling through the mountains, to give them supplies and guide them across the San Joaquin all the way to his rancho on the slopes of Mt. Diablo. A most welcome item was farina meal for Nancy Kelsey, who a few days before had become too weak to travel on until her husband shot a deer and brought her some meat to revive her.

They waited for Bartleson and his men to catch up and then all proceeded together to Marsh’s rancho, crossing the San Joaquin River whose width they estimated at about 100 yards. The promised land of the San Joaquin looked like anything but a paradise to the new arrivals. The drought had left the land depressingly parched and sere, but Marsh cheered them up with a feast of a fat hog accompanied by some of his California brandy. Their welcome was warm, as he happily showed off his surroundings and family, consisting of his wife from one of the local tribes, and several children, who slept most nights out of doors unless it was raining, in which case they unrolled some skins on the dirt floor and slept inside.

Afterwards, some of the travelers took up Marsh’s offer to sleep under a roof after so many months under the stars. Dawson and some of the others tried this novelty, but found that between the fleas and the rushing for the outhouse by their companions whose digestion could not cope with the fat pork that they had eaten so eagerly, they hardly slept.

Cheyenne Dawson, with a small animal stuck to his chin.. Donald Trump, take note 

 

 For Chiles, Hopper, Dawson and Bartleson, two days

with Marsh was enough.  They wanted to get on and see the territory.  So it was off to the nearby pueblo San Jose

Joe B, with his new wife Margaret, probably 1853

for passports, by way of a night in jail over a little misunderstanding as to how they had arrived in California.  But once that had been cleared up, and with the payment of $5, they were visitors in good standing and off to Monterey, the provincial capital, to see the lay of the land.  More exploring followed, and on a visit to former Missouri neighbor in Napa County, George Yount, Chiles saw the valley that would excite his imagination and industry.  He also called on Gen. Mariano Vallejo military governor, who wholeheartedly supported his plan to establish a mill in the region.  It was the start of the adventure that would last the rest of his life.

[The majority of the text above is taken from the MS of my next writing project--The Life and Times of Joe B Chiles.]

Chiles ' house where he ended his days - St. Helena

Chiles' adobe house, Chiles Valley

Speaking of adventures, here are some statistics from our trans-continental junket:

Miles  -- approximately  3010 miles

States visited -- 8 -- Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, California

Number of cups of coffee served in something other than styrofoam -- 5

Discouraging words -- few

Tanks of gas -- approx. 14
Number of motels stayed in -- 12

 Memorable meals -- few

 Memorable meals for the wrong reasons -- too many

Good company -- much

Through to the San Joaquin

Little Antelope Valley, where they started.

Then this?

Are you sure it's not this way?

Wandering dazed and confused--and that's us, not Joe B.  We set out this morning with the best of intentions to find the company's starting point from Antelope Valley, near Topaz Lake on the California-Nevada border.  It all seemed reasonably clear when the large scale topographical map was laid out on the bed in the hotel, but somehow when we drove toward the mountains all the cross-referencing between the map and the territory in front of us fell apart.  Looking for the actual trail as opposed to the one on the map as described in the diaries was like a semiotic conundrum--and when we three brothers -- two holding the map and one holding the steering wheel -- began to interact, it was a rerun of ancient history to the time when we were growing up.  Freud would have had a field day, Gregory Bateson would have been nodding sagely, and a glance at the gas gauge showed that we were heading toward empty.  It was all a metaphor for the road trip.  And all this was in an air-conditioned car with full stomachs.  Take away the air-conditioning, the food, the car, and the map--it's no wonder that the company of 1841 began to fall apart.

In the previous blog, we left our company contemplating the menace of the High Sierra, with snow capped mountains in every direction.

I didn't take this one--but it looks chilly enough to suggest the mid-October panorama that confronted Joe B and the rest of the company.

 They  descended quickly from the high pass where they crested the Sierra-- down 3000 feet in six miles of trail.  By the next day, October 19,  they were at the Middle Fork of the Stanislaus River. Bidwell wrote,
'Descending the stream, we found several oak scrubs which confirmed us in  the hope that we were on the waters of the Pacific.   But the route became exceedingly difficult - the stream had swelled to a river - could not approach it - could only hear it roaring among the rocks....The roaring winds and hollow murmur of the dashing waters conveyed in the darkness of the night the most solemn and impressive ideas of solitude.'   

They camped overnight, and looking around the next morning, they began to fear that they were descending too deeply into a canyon that was narrowing impossibly.  The next morning they sent out scouts to see if there was an alternative route.
'Men went in different directions to see if there was any possibility of extracting ourselves from this place without going back....Capt. B [Bartleson] also tired of waiting for the explorers to return, started down the stream, which so jaded his animals that he was obliged to wait all day to rest them before he was able to retrace his steps.  In the meantime the rest of the Company, suffering for water were obliged to travel.  We proceeded directly N. up the mountains about 4 miles, found a little grass and water - here we killed one of the 2 oxen' --Bidwell

They were now down to one single travel-worn ox as their only food supply.  Bidwell went out hunting and became separated from the rest, found nothing to shoot for food, but managed to acquire some acorn mush from an Indian boy he met on the trail.  He was still desperately hungry and now completely unsure of which direction the rest of the company had gone.  When darkness fell, he curled up under a fallen tree with a small fire to make up for the lack of a blanket or coat.  Come morning he found that he had spent the night in a grove of giant sequoias, and later in life claimed that he was the first white man to see these amazing trees.

He soon found the rest of the party and although the exact route they took is unclear, they worked their way down to the river and eventually crossed to the south side of the river, then traveled south down the South Fork canyon before crossing northwesterly to the North Fork to follow the drainage of the North Fork into the San Joaquin Valley.  It was while they were working their way out of the canyon lands that they had their only violent encounter with native Americans of the whole trip.  They had taken on a guide who, in their opinion, was mis-directing and deliberately confusing them in order to have them abandon all their goods for his companions to ransack.  They became aware that Indians were shadowing them,  looking for abandoned valuables in their vacated campsites and dismissed the guide.  Convinced that he had been trying to kill them, one of the party, Grove Cook, determined to mete out justice.

As the rest of the company broke camp on October 27, Cook stayed behind, hidden, to see if their former guide would turn up to lead his companions to ransack the former campsite.  When he appeared at the head of a small band of local Indians, Crook shot him and fled.  Fortunately for the company they were almost out of the mountains, and within three days they emerged into the great valley of the San Joaquin River, before the Indians could launch a retaliatory raid.

On the last two days of October, to their relief and delight, they found themselves traveling down the valley of the Stanislaus River where it opens into the central valley. They saw the tracks of large herds of elk, and flights of wild fowl. When they finally reached the lower Stanislaus they saw thousands of antelope. On the first of November they stopped to hunt, bagging antelope and fowl. Bidwell wrote, “My breakfast, this morning formed a striking contrast with that of yesterday which was the lights of a wolf.," while Chiles recalled, “…every man wept that night as they feasted,” safe in the knowledge that they were out of the mountains and out of danger.

It was near the end of the dry summer season in California and they observed a parched, sere, landscape.  But it didn't matter to them.  There was game, there were wild sweet grapes, and they were in the land that they had sacrificed so much to reach.  Nothing they would do later in life would be so memorable as being in the first company across the plains to California, establishing a route that would be followed by one of the biggest overland migrations in history.  Joe B. Chiles made six more trips across the plains, but this was the one that stood out in his memory.

Into the mountains

We left Joe B and the others standing in the Nevada desert open mouthed at the treachery of Bartleson and the others riding off with the last of the good ox meat, determined to save themselves by getting over the mountains before the winter set in.  The remainder of the party had to face up to the Sierra, a mountain range the like of which they had never encountered before.  It would be their greatest physical and psychological challenge of the journey, demanding route-finding and mountaineering skills of the highest order.  In order to get to their destination--the ranch of John Marsh--east of San Francisco bay, they had to navigate their way through mile-deep canyons and soaring snow capped mountains.  And it was mid-October--they had to do it before the snows came.  In the meantime, Bartleson and his companions had eventually returned, hungry, sorry and footsore.  They had failed to find a way over the mountains and had used up all their food.  Now they were going to be served up a generous portion of humble pie.  Needless to say, they were coolly received, but another ox was slaughtered to feed them and the party proceeded into the mountains together.

It's hard to imagine that one of us would be so forgiving, but they had all come a long way together, and probably realized that there was strength in numbers, even if some of those numbers had shown themselves wanting in the solidarity department. 

The precise point of entry into the Sierra is unclear from the diary entries of the two principal diarists.   It is generally agreed that they followed the west fork of the Walker River to the foot of the eastern Sierra, and the mountains can be entered two different ways from this approach. 

Rather than debate which canyon they entered, I can quote from the two diarists in the party as my brothers and I tried to follow their progress from the roads that exist today, carrying motorists from the eastern Sierra across the mountains via the Sonora Pass.

'This morning we set forth into the rolling mountains, in many places it was so steep, that all were obliged to take it on foot.  Part of the day we traveled through vallies between peaks where the way was quite level...encamped on the side of the mountain, so elevated that the ice remained all day in the stream - but we had not yet arrived at the summit.  Killed another ox this evening - made 12 miles.' --John Bidwell

'Many of the pines were 12 feet in diameter and no less than 200 ft. high'

From here they intersected the East Fork of the Carson River, which had some grass for their animals.  They were desperate to supplement their stock of food, but were unable to find any game.  The rock walls of the canyon of the Carson River became so steep that they were forced to dismount and look for a side canyon.  They explored several before selecting Golden Canyon and making camp on October 17.

The next morning, 'Having ascended about a half mile, a frightful prospect opened before us:  naked mountains whose summits still retained the snows of perhaps a thousand years...the winds roared - but - in the dark deepGulfs which yawned on ever side, profound solitude seemed to reign.'

On October 18,  they climbed 2300 feet up Golden Canyon and at an elevation of 9425 feet they crested the Sierra Nevada, but although they were pleased at having located a pass over the summit, they were now faced with the chilling prospect of snowcapped mountains in every direction.

Today, 174 years later, in the fourth year of the California drought, we were short on snow-capped mountains, but the towering peaks above the deep stream-cut gorges were very daunting.  It was hard for us to understand how Joe B and the others had held their nerve--except that they had no alternative.  In later years Joe B recalled how the sight of Nancy Kelsey, with her toddler in her arms, marching resolutely along with the others had inspired him to carry on when he felt like quitting.

For the emigrants, the next days were spent in even greater challenges in getting down from the peaks that they had conquored, with virtually all their food gone.  We pondered this by one of the streams that they crossed while we ate our 21st century sandwiches...

...and used our 21st century iphones...

Humboldt hell

We can leave Joe B and the others at the foot of the Sierra for the time being and consider the fate of those who followed in his wake along the Humboldt where my brothers and I drove today.  Where Joe B's company had the disadvantage of being the first and not knowing where they were going or how much time or distance would be involved, the followers in later years, particularly during the Gold Rush of 1849-50, experienced all the difficulties in competition with thousands of others, all trying to get food and especially water in this desert which bordered the Humboldt River.  This was a journey that Joe B also completed in 1848 and 1854.

Pardon my dust

If all went well, they reached the Humboldt in late August or early September, after the hot dry summer had reduced its flow.  The emigrants expected a typical river from the eastern US, and instead found a stream that meandered, warm and soapy with alkali, down weaving channels, twisting and turning along loops and turns called oxbows because they resembled the yoke that fitted over the necks of the oxen who pulled the wagons on the trail.  The river was constantly creating new oxbows and cutting off old ones, leaving standing water in oxbow lakes, called sloughs by the emigrants.  Wary companies did not allow their animals to approach the dangerous river bottoms to drink, but instead took water and feed to them.  Many an ox or mule sank into the muddy margins of the river and drowned trying to reach the murky, soapy water for a drink.

A Humboldt slough

The channels were lined with their bloated bodies, combining their smells with that of carrion and waste to create an odor that tortured the emigrants--along with the exposed, dreary landscape and the caustic alkali dust that burned the skin and eyes.

'The heat is fiery, intense, sultry, oppressive, suffocating, parching and scorching  earth, and water and air and every green thing'  --Israel Shipman Lord, 1849

Forty mile desert

Discomfort, hunger, annoyance and exhaustion sharpened the emigrants' nerves to  a razor edge.  In one of the better documented episodes, this was the place where James Reed of the Donner Party killed a fellow emigrant and was banished into the desert.  From Winnemucca, where we stayed last night, the Humboldt begins to arc southwest into 45 miles of trail with worse water, more dreary brown hills, deeper dust, and diminishing forage for the animals.  Emigrants who had been disgusted by the local Indians' diet were now hunting for the same lizards, coyotes, squirrels or whatever they could find to eat.

'I killed and skinned and gutted about fifty frogs an inch and a half long and fried them with our hawk this noon and eat them....shot a fisher [heron] and had him and his gravy for dinner with burned-biscuit coffee very good.'  --Charles Darwin, 1849

I have noticed several dead horses, mules and oxen by the roadside, that had their hams cut out to eat by the starving wretches along the road.' --Eleazer Ingalls, 1850

'The farther we traveled the worse [the river] became.  During the last eight or ten days it seems to have been mixed up with everything nauseous...This is the end of the most miserable river on the face of the earth.'  Margaret Frink, 1850

But now the emigrants started across something even worse, the Forty-mile Desert, a hot griddle of dry expanse,  with no shade and a crust of salt and silt crunching underfoot.  The emigrants would start into it in the evening, hoping to cross the main part before the sun came up.  On moonless nights they would light their way with burning abandoned wagons, whose illumination reflected the eyes of the dead oxen, mules an horses who lay still attached to their traces.

'At intervals could be seen wagons...with two to four yoke of cattle lying dead, with the yokes on their necks, the chains still in the rings, just as they fell and died, most of them with their tongues hanging from their mouths.'  -- Gilbert Cole, 1852

'But no one stopped to gaze or help.  The living procession marched steadily onward, giving little heed to the destruction going on, in their own anxiety to reach a place of safety.'  -- Margaret Frink, 1850

The final stretch were the Carson or Truckee dune fields, a dozen or 15 miles of deep, loose sand that sucked at hooves and wheels, while the animals scented water and desperately strained to reach it.  California traders hauled water out from the Carson River and sold it to desperate immigrants for a dollar [$30] or more a gallon.  Some emigrants, having reached the rivers, transported water back to struggling family, friends and strangers.  For most the worst was now over, and they had only to breach the high Sierra which rose in their path like a towering wall of rock.

Today, an endless succession of forty to sixty foot trucks, and countless cars, roll along the interstate at seventy or eighty miles an hour, covering the same distance and terrain that cost the emigrants so dearly, in less than an hour.

Nevada Nightmare on the Humboldt

Having made good their escape from the Salt Lake basin, the company of 32 men, one woman and a child, now wagon-less, footsore and hungry, trudged wearily west.  The menacing drama of the landscape could only have heightened the tension of being lost in the desert.  It was mid-September.  The days were still hot, but the temperature dropped ominously at night to freeze the water in the buckets.  Ben and Nancy Kelsey abandoned their wagons near present-day Lucin, Utah.  The others followed suit four days later at Oasis Nevada.  As they tried to fashion packsaddles for their mules, horses and oxen, they were visited by an ancient Indian who told them by gestures that he had dreamed of their coming.  While they set aside the goods they could not transport, they gestured that he should help himself--to which the elderly man responded with a lengthy prayer of thanks.  It was a meeting marked by a sadly unusual level of good will, not reflected in many other exchanges in the years to come.

'We signed to our aged host that the wagons and everything abandoned were his, all his, and left him circumscribing the heavens--the happiest, richest, most religious man I ever saw'--Nicholas 'Cheyenne' Dawson, 1841

The old Indian must truly have thought he had happened on to some strange beings as he watched them depart, with their animals, unused to being saddled with goods, twitching and bucking under the weight of their burdens.  The first few miles toward the Ruby mountains saw loads being shed and much re-packing accompanied by significant profanity.

Bidwell noted in his diary,
It was but a few minutes  before the packs began to turn; horses became scared, mules kicked, oxen jumped and bellowed and articles were scattered in all directions.  Dawson added grimly, 'There was one thing we had no trouble to pack--our provisions'

East of the Rubies

The company tacked anxiously south, west, and south again until they found themselves at the foot of the Ruby Mountains.  They had been warned to not go too far south--or north.  Blindly, they pushed  on into the mountains, over Harrison Pass, following the creek at the bottom of the twisting canyon which led to a west-flowing river.  Although they did not know it, this was the south fork of the Mary's River [soon to be renamed the Humboldt] that they had been seeking. 

Entry to Harrison Pass through the Ruby Mountains

Up over Harrison Pass through the Ruby Mountains

But no sooner had they started to follow the river, than it appeared to be dwindling and drying up.  They had been expecting it to swell with tributaries and guide them, said Nicholas Dawson, 'to the plains of California and on to the Pacific, where our troubles would end, and where we could eat, eat, eat...'

The slow moving Humboldt River

More Humboldt River

Here their solidarity began to seriously fracture.  The owners of the horses and mules could move faster than the oxen, but the oxen were all  the food remaining.   After a few days of tracking the winding Mary's River, eight men of the party seized the lion's share of the meat from one of the freshly butchered oxen, mounted up and made for the the mountains, leaving their companions staring after them in the desert.  The remaining 26 emigrants had found some local Paiute guides who had a limited knowledge of the desert ahead.  The party plodded onward with the remaining cattle, past the place where the river disappeared into the sands.  Next they made their way across the desperate 40-mile desert and turned south toward the west fork of the Walker River, running parallel to the wall of the Sierra Nevada mountains.  On October 15, with the winter advancing day by day, they camped at the foot of the Sierra, hoping to get a foothold into the mountain fastness.  During the night, their Indian guides, unable or unwilling to take them any further, slipped off into the night...

Salt Lake Saga

The riders returned from Fort Hall, overtaking the main group including Joe B in what is today northern Utah, bringing second-hand information from trappers at the fort who had only heard about the country that lay in front of them.  The advice was, don't go too far south before turning west toward California because there was an immense desert with no water and no feed for livestock.  They were further warned not to turn too far north because they would get lost in a maze of streams and canyons where they would wander, confused and starving.  But if they would head west at the right place, they would eventually strike the Mary's River [later named the Humboldt] which would they could follow to the heart of the Great Basin between the mountain ranges and eventually to the rivers flowing west.  As the party continued down the Bear River looking down for the place to turn west toward the Mary's River, they noticed that the stream was growing increasingly salty.

The far side of the Salt Lake riding on a mirage of water

They toiled in the August temperatures; the oxen and horses could not eat the grass which was covered in salt.  The heat waves shimmered, turning clumps of bushes into well-watered groves of trees.  Confused, the company followed mirages across the mud flats north of the Great Salt Lake.

John Bidwell recalled, 'Thus misled, we traveled all day without water, and at midnight found ourselves on a plain, level as a floor, incrusted with salt, and as white as snow...This plain became softer and softer until our poor, almost famished, animals could not pull our wagons.  In fact, we were going direct to Salt Lake and did not know it.'  

Try driving a wagon through this stuff

They looped around, crossed their own tracks, struggling through sagebrush so dense that it tipped some of the lighter wagons over.  In their blundering along the north end of the lake, they at last found a source of good water and sent out scouts to try and find the Mary's River.  They sat in camp for over a week waiting for them to return, which they did with the news that the river was about five days march ahead.  They toiled onward with their wagons, until near the present western border, one of the more forceful characters in the company had had enough.  Ben Kelsey unyoked his oxen, emptied his wagon and loaded what belongings he could on their backs.  On their horses he put his 18-year-old wife Nancy and their toddler daughter.  The wagon would stay where it was and they would pack to California driving their oxen.  Within a few days, the rest of the party had copied their example.

With this, they were no longer a wagon train, but a starving group of  increasingly fractious stragglers with the dream of California in their minds.  If it could be anywhere along the line of our pursuit of our ancestor, this was the place where my brothers and I would be able to see exactly where he had gone and what he had faced.  The road was unpaved and the dust billowed up behind the car as we rumbled over the gravel toward the town of Lucin Utah.  The thermometer in the car showed that the outside temperature was topping 90 degrees.  It was a good day to be together--three brothers whose relative had done challenging things--in an air-conditioned car.

The road

So we were able to accomplish one of our goals--to walk in Joe B's footsteps, in the shadow of one of the landmarks that guided Joe B and the other emigrants who came this way, Pilot Peak.

 And along the way, quite by chance, in a tiny town that vanished into the landscape, we came upon another relic of more recent times--an establishment that referenced the overland trail, on our little bit of it, though so far off the beaten track of the interstate that it never had a chance.

Brother John, is he welcoming us, or warning us off?

Down the valley of the Bear

"No one of the party knew anything about mountaineering and scarcely anyone had ever been into the Indian Territory, yet a large majority felt that we were fully competent to go anywhere no matter what the difficulties might be or how numberous and warlike the Indians."

So said John Bidwell, whose diary forms the main record of the 1841 expedition in which Joe B played a major part.  Ignorance and self-confidence are always a potent mixture, and with a great stroke of luck they hit on the expedition of the missionaries and joined forces with them and their guide, Broken Hand Fitzpatrick. 

                                                Thomas 'Broken Hand' Fitzpatrick
John Bidwell



Fitzpatrick then guided them up the Platte, across the plains and through the Rockies via the Continental Divide at South Pass Wyoming with no great dramas, during which time there had been two weddings and a self-inflicted death.  But now, in present-day southeast Idaho,following the Bear River northwestward past Soda Springs to Sheep Rock where the river curls around the north end of the Wasatch Mountains and turns back to the south, he had  some strong  words of advice.    He  believed that to try and carry on to California, where no other wagon train had ever gone was foolhardy in the extreme and he persuaded about half of them to opt for Oregon Territory, but the other 34, including Joe B, turned their oxen south with the Bear River heading for the Great Salt Lake. They sent four men on horseback  to  Ft. Hall, four days ride away, to see if they could purchase some supplies and ideally a guide who knew something of the route they should take to California.
                Ft. Hall, southeastern Idaho
In the meantime,  the remainder of the California-bound emigrants went slowly down the valley of the Bear, which was reminiscent of their travels along the other rivers with which they had become familiar.  They criss-crossed the river, enjoying the late August sun and the availability of feed for their animals.  But some severe challenges lay ahead.  The four horsemen returned from Ft. Hall after 10 days with the news that there was nothing to buy and no guide who could lead them. But they pressed on nonetheless.  Bidwell and another man even found time to explore the neighboring mountain where they had seen snow glinting in the sun.  They entirely mis-judged the distance and were forced to sleep under a tree high up on the mountain, returning the next day to a mixture of  relief and opprobrium from their fellow travellers who were convinced that they had been killed by Indians.  The party now got under way in earnest, shortly arriving at the northern edge of the Great Salt Lake where their trials would truly begin. 

How it looks today

Valley of the Bear, still as crowded as ever

Our little party is now three--the three Chiles brothers--joined today in Pocatello Idaho by youngest brother John.  We might be fewer than Joe B's company, but our technology is mighty, even here in The Big Empty of the Great Basin.  Of course this encourages lively discussion about directions as the two who are not driving consult with maps and iphones to help us most closely map our route from Sheep Rock to the Great Salt Lake to that of Joe B.  Up to this point, the route of the 1841 expedition blended into the same California trail followed by all the others who came after, but beyond southeastern Idaho, their route was almost unique to these first emigrants across the continent, mostly because it was so difficult and tiresome that virtually everyone else found an easier route.

We ate tonight in a Mexican restaurant, largely because it was the only place we could find that served alcohol in the form of beer.  Utah is a famously dry state, because of the influence of the Mormon Church.  At any rate, it was all worth while when we examined the menu to find one of their signature dishes called 'Los Tres Chiles'  Job done.