A full moon was just coming up over the cliffs at his back, throwing light into the dark recesses along the way. With its help the steep, dangerous places on the trail were negotiated without difficulty. The dead pack horse was found beside the trail and the bottom of the canyon was reached about 11 p.m., when the full moon was shining into the depths of the canyon and towers and temples were illumined with snowy brightness. Camping there, he slept out the night in his saddle blankets under the enchanting witchery of the starry heavens between the brilliant walls that seemed to reach the sky.
In 1906 Flanigan sold out to Alfred P. Stout[64] and O. D. Gifford. They replaced his wire cable with a heavier twisted rope cable, which served for many years and over which millions of feet of lumber were lowered into the canyon and hauled to the settlements farther downstream. Stout established a shingle mill in Zion Canyon about a quarter of a mile below the cable and near the foot of the northeast corner of the Great White Throne. At first, large cottonwood logs were cut for shingles, but as these proved of inferior quality, yellow pine logs were supplied via cable. The shingle mill was washed away by floods two years later.
A sad accident occurred at the top of the cable on July 28, 1908. A party of young people vacationing on the east rim went over to see the cable operate from the top. Three of them were standing in the box at the edge, directly under the cable, looking into the depths of the canyon, when a bolt of lightning struck the cable, killing Thornton Hepworth, Jr., and stunning Clarinda Langston and Lionel Stout. Miss Langston fell limp on the edge of the box where she was in imminent danger of plummeting down the cliff. Miss Elza Stout, uninjured nearby, rescued her from the precarious position, but before assistance could be rendered him, a second bolt struck the wire and killed Lionel Stout. Miss Langston recovered, but the bodies of the two boys were lowered into the canyon over the cable.
It was more than a year later when people started to “ride the cable.” About the middle of September, 1910, soon after Zion had been proclaimed a national monument, some members of Scott P. Stewart’s surveying party visited the top of the cable. They were told that a dog had been sent up from below and that he was nearly crazy when he reached the top. Quinby Stewart, a fearless youth, told them that if they would bring some watermelons up to the foot, he would go down on the cable and help eat them. True to his word, when the melons arrived he climbed on a load of lumber ready to be lowered, and holding to the cable, rode safely to the bottom. It was a swift flight of two minutes, and to a young man of his disposition a rousing thrill. Others followed suit, and after eating the melons, rode back to the top in the empty cage.
Riding the cable proved an attraction for those gifted with strong nerves. At a later date, Frank Petty came to operate the sawmill at the top of the cliff. He was a large man, weighing nearly 300 pounds, too heavy to travel comfortably up and down the trails, and the road around the Arizona strip to his home in Rockville being too long for convenience, he took to riding the cable. On one occasion, as he started down, the lumber on which he was riding struck the top of the cliff and loosened the chain holding one end of the load. His son, Frank, operating the brakes at the top, seeing the mishap, applied the brakes just in time to prevent his father from falling down the face of the 1,800 foot declivity. With a few inches of the lumber still clinging to the edge and his father paralyzed with fear and afraid to move for fear of jarring it loose, Frank climbed underneath and re-fastened the chain. With a sigh of relief, he then lowered his father in safety to the bottom.
Kane County and Arizona
Just as the settlement of Iron County had provided a stepping stone to the exploration and settlement of the Virgin River Valley, so in turn, the latter served in like stead in opening up Kane County and the Kaibab National Forest of northern Arizona.
In the fall of 1858, after Albert Sydney Johnston’s army had entered Utah, Brigham Young, still doubtful about the future, instructed missionaries under Jacob Hamblin’s leadership to cross the Colorado River to the southeast and visit the Moquis or Town Indians with the object of exploring the possibilities of retreating with his people to this region should the difficulties with the army become unbearable.[65]
Accordingly, Jacob Hamblin, one of the leading figures in Utah’s southern frontier, left the Santa Clara on October 28, 1858, with a party of twelve, including an Indian guide, a Spanish interpreter, and a Welsh interpreter, the last because of wildly erroneous reports that the Moquis spoke a variant of that tongue. The Indian led them through the Arizona strip via Pipe Springs and Kaibab to the old Ute ford where Escalante had crossed eighty-two years earlier. The visit to the Moquis was brief, some of the men returning in November, the others later in the winter. This expedition revealed the general topography between the Virgin and Colorado.
