Mary Heers, Author at Wild About Utah

July 24, 2023September 11, 2023

A Mendon Bear Story

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the puppet show is about to begin!

It was Pioneer Day in Mendon, and the puppeteer’s loud cry brought the little kids running to the puppet theater on the town square. They settled down on the grass in a hushed silence as the narrator began:

This is a true story. It took place in early pioneer days in Mendon about 130 years ago.

And now introducing: the bravest man in Mendon, Tom Graham. He was so brave he would grab a rattlesnake by the neck and spit tobacco juice right down its throat.

A hidden water pistol shot a stream of water out into the audience, which caused some oohs and ahhs in the front row.

The Tom Graham puppet took a bow and disappeared

And now introducing: the biggest and baddest bear in Cache Valley at the time, The Big Slough Grizzly!

The puppeteers booed loudly. If there was any doubt that the bear puppet was the villain in the story, these doubts soon disappeared.

A small wooly lamb popped up and the bear pounced on it. Baaaaa went the lamb as it sank out of sight. The same thing happened to a calf and a small pink pig.

It was time for the hero, Tom Graham to take action.

Tom and another puppet popped up. Let’s go find that bad bear, Tom said.

They bobbed across the stage in single file, looking at the ground. Then they saw a bear paw print and they jerked back.

It’s 8 inches wide! And 12 inches long!! Not counting the claw!!!

We need to go get help, they said as they ran off the stage

In the meantime, Tom went down to the watery sloughs below Mendon to get some firewood. Bad luck. He ran right into the Big Slough Grizzly. The bear took a mighty swing at Tom and knocked his head right off his shoulders!

Now the Tom puppet was made out of a leg of panty hose. So Tom’s long neck stretched out a good two feet as his head flew out over the audience before snapping back and disappearing.

This caused quite a sensation in the audience. In fact, I used to judge the success of each show by how high the kids came off their seats.

But the story wasn’t over. After Tom lost his head, every man in Mendon picked up his rifle and headed for the slough. They found the bear’s den. Two very brave men stepped into the entrance and got a couple shots off. The bear did not come out.

Another man pushed his old flea bitten mare up to the entrance. This brought the bear out. The men opened fire.

It got really noisy as two young boys in the puppet theatre shot off their cap pistols like mad. The Big Slough Grizzly keeled over and sank out of sight. That was the end of the story.

This is Mary Heers, puppeteer (now retired), bringing you this Pioneer Day true bear story for Wild About Utah.

Credits:

Photos: Courtesy Pixabay, Angela-AMBQUINN, Photographer, https://pixabay.com/photos/bear-grizzly-bear-grizzly-7860673/
Featured Audio: Wagner Hoedown, Courtesy & © Sons of the Pioneers, https://sonsofthepioneers.org/
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Postings

Grizzly Bear, FWS Focus, US Fish & Wildlife Service, US Department of the Interior, https://www.fws.gov/species/grizzly-bear-ursus-arctos-horribilis

Mendon City, UT, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/mendoncity
Website: mendoncity.org

Mendon City Pioneer Day Celebration, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100066990000950

In the Shade of the Mountains, Histories of Mendon and Petersboro, Exemplar Press, Watkins Printing, Logan, Dec 2011, https://library.mendoncity.org/
Call Number 979.212 MENDON

June 26, 2023September 11, 2023

Sheep, Salt and the Great Salt Lake

Floating on the Great Salt Lake, Courtesy & © Mary Heers — Fremont Island
The Great Salt Lake
Courtesy & © Mary Heers

Floating on the
Great Salt Lake
Courtesy & © Mary Heers

All of last year, the news about the Great Salt Lake was going from bad to worse. We began to hear dire predictions that the shrinking lake might disappear altogether.

Then, finally, with some legislative action and a big boost from record snow and rain, the water level began to rise. The marina on the southern tip of the lake opened up.

I grabbed the chance to take a boat ride out onto the lake. The water was calm and smooth and Fremont Island loomed large ahead. We were the only boat out there.

Ah, I thought, this is a lot like Kit Carson and John Fremont must have seen the island when they paddled up to it in 1843.

The boat operator told us some early history of the island. In 1859 two brothers, Henry and Daniel Miller, took 153 sheep out to the island and left them there. It seemed ideal – plenty of grass, adequate fresh water’ and no wild beasts. So, no need to leave a herder.

The brothers returned periodically to shear the sheep. They also built two huge vats, lit a fire of sagebrush under them, and boiled the lake water down to salt.

Business was good. Boatloads of salt were sold to the silver mines in Montana who needed it in their operations. The excess lambs were taken to market and sold.

By now the sheep, left alone on the island for long stretches of time, were becoming wild as deer. One roundup, some sheep were so determined not to get caught that they took off swimming away from the island. They were still going when they disappeared over the horizon.

But the story really took a turn when a judge from Salt Lake, Uriah Wenner, took advantage of the Desert Land Act intended to encourage irrigation and farming in the west. He filed a claim on the island and evicted the sheep. It was 1885, and Jacob Miller, now in charge of the Miller family sheep operation on the island was a polygamist “in hiding.” He didn’t dare go to court to challenge the claim.

As the last of the sheep were taken off the island, they were placed in the custody of an experienced herder. The herder was just beginning to cook his breakfast in his hut.

“You’d better watch these sheep,” he was warned.

“Don’t tell me how to herd sheep,” said the herder.

He finished his breakfast. When he came out of his hut, the sheep were gone.

The story ended, but the best was yet to come. The boat stopped and my husband and I slid into the water off the back of the boat.

Gleefully we bobbed around like corks. It was impossible to sink. I flipped on my back and stretched out. It would have been easy to doze off. Buoyancy at its best.

The current salinity of the Great Salt Lake is 16%. That’s just about halfway from the oceans at 3½ and the saltiest water on earth – the Dead Sea at 33%

The Great Salt Lake is our unique treasure. But it’s future is still at risk. Will we keep it or lose it?

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah.

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy & © Kevin Colver, https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Postings

Seymour Miller’s Account of an Early Sheep Operation on Fremont Island (Edited by David H. Miller and Anne H. Eckman,) Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 56, Number 2, 1988, Utah State History, https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/uhq_volume56_1988_number2/s/157386

Great Salt Lake Collaborative, Solutions Journalism Network, https://greatsaltlakenews.org/

May 22, 2023September 11, 2023

Tulips and Daffodils- It’s Spring!

Daffodil Encore, Thanksgiving Point Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer — The Trumpet Choir
Daffodils at Thanksgiving Point
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

Daffodil Encore
Thanksgiving Point
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

My Favorite Sign Along the Path
Lilja Rogers, Published as Hocus Pocus in the Saturday Evening Post, 1961
Image Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

Mary Eating a Tulip
Courtesy & © Mary Heers

Above Tulips From Rebound Visit
Thanksgiving Point
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

When I arrived at the Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point I was informed by a guide that the tulips were running late.

“No tulips?” I asked. I had heard they had planted 250,000.

“It has everything to do with the soil temperature,” my guide explained. It was April 14. She wasn’t expecting the tulips to emerge for at least another two weeks.

All was not lost, she hastened to add.

“The daffodils are up.”

So off we went along the paths of the 50 acre Ashton Gardens. Sure enough, hundreds of daffodils were waving their heads in the light breeze. I was especially drawn to a patch that they were intensely yellow, almost orange.

“Those are the ‘Tweety-Birds’,” my guide said.

I knelt down to get a good look at the trumpet shape of the flowers. Wow, I thought. This is the trumpet choir heralding the end of winter and the coming of spring.

So with my return ticket secure in my pocket, I went back to Mendon to wait. Snow was still on the ground.

This gave me time to read up on tulips. I found they were originally from Turkey. Tulip, in Turkish, means turban.

The exotic plant arrived in Holland in the 1500’s., It soon became so popular that the price went through the roof. At the height of the tulip mania, some people were willing to pay the price of a house for a single bulb.

About this time, a friend loaned me a book about this phenomenon, Tulip Fever. It turned out to be a real page turner. Set in 1630, young lovers in Amsterdam concocted an incredible scheme to run away and live comfortably in the colonies – if they played their tulips right.

Back in Mendon, when the snow finally started to melt, my neighbors began to tell me how the hungry deer had come into their gardens and beheaded their tulips. Their daffodils were left untouched.

Time for more research. I learned the daffodils produce a toxic alkaloid, lycorine, which makes them taste bitter. Tulips, however, are not only edible, but delicious.

About this time I noticed a lone tulip popping up next to my apple tree. No one planted a bulb here. This tulip had arrived as a seed. Years ago, the wind, or a bird. or an animal dropped this seed . Tulip seeds only take a few months to germinate. But it can take up to 5 years for the plant to produce a bulb which, in turn, produces the flower.

During WWII, when the German army occupied Holland, a large part of the population found themselves with nothing to eat but the tulip bulbs they had set aside to plant. They survived because a tulip bulb has as many calories as a potato.

I was sharing this tidbit of information with my good friend and neighbor when she reminded me the early Mormon pioneers had staved off hunger by eating the wild Sego Lilies that were growing on the nearby mountainsides.

Then she disappeared into her kitchen. She came back with a flower pot holding a tulip that had already bloomed. She pulled out the bulb and asked me if I wanted to taste it.

Never one to refuse a gift, I peeled off the outer layers and took a bite.

I chewed. She waited. It wasn’t bitter and it wasn’t sweet. I chewed some more. I wanted to say

green. Finally it came to me.

“Celery!”

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah.

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Featured Audio:
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Postings

Tulip Festival, Thanksgiving Point, https://thanksgivingpoint.org/events/tulip-festival/
Tulip Festival: Bounce-back!, https://thanksgivingpoint.org/tulip-festival-bounce-back/ [accessed 5/13/2023]

Pace, Eliza, Tulip festival to return to Thanksgiving Point, KSL TV, March 7, 2023, https://ksltv.com/530567/tulip-festival-to-return-to-thanksgiving-point/ [accessed 5/13/2023]

Stefanaki, A., Walter, T. & van Andel, T. Tracing the introduction history of the tulip that went wild (Tulipa sylvestris) in sixteenth-century Europe. Sci Rep 12, 9786 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-13378-9 AND https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13378-9 [accessed 5/13/2023]

The Amsterdam Tulip Museum, https://amsterdamtulipmuseum.com/tulip/
Tulip History Outside Of Holland, The Amsterdam Tulip Museum, https://amsterdamtulipmuseum.com/topics/tulip-history-in-many-nations/

Moggach, Deborah, Tulip Fever: A Novel, Dial Press Trade Paperback, April 10, 2001,https://www.amazon.com/Tulip-Fever-Novel-Deborah-Moggach/dp/0385334923

Eating tulip bulbs, Fluwel, https://www.fluwel.com/pages/eating-tulip-bulbs

Brown, Janice, First a Howling Blizard… A Poem by Lilja Rogers, Posted May 31, 2007, Cow Hampshire, https://www.cowhampshireblog.com/2007/05/31/poem-first-the-howling-winds-awoke-us-by-lilja-rogers/

April 24, 2023September 11, 2023

Great Salt Lake Mirabilite Mounds

Mirabilite Mounds in the Great Salt Lake Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer — Mirabilite Mounds
in the Great Salt Lake
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

Back in October 2019, the ranger at the Great Salt Lake State Park began to notice a white mound forming on the sand flats behind the visitor center. The white mounds turned out to be hydrated sodium sulfate – known as mirabilite- which was being carried to the surface by the upwelling of a fresh water spring. Since the 1940’s geologists have known that in this area, 30 inches below the surface, there was a 3 – 6 foot thick shelf of mirabilite. They knew about the fresh water springs What was new was cold air. Since this stretch of sand was no longer underwater, the mirabilite carried to the surface stayed there as crystals, piling up on each other, puddling and spreading out. One mound rose to the height of 3 feet.

Mirabilite Springs in the shadow of the Kennecott Smelter stack Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Phorographer — Mirabilite Springs in the shadow of the Kennecott Smelter stack
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Phorographer

When the mounds started to form again this winter, I jumped at the chance to to go and take a look. I must admit at first I was a little underwhelmed at the size, perhaps because the Kennecott Smelter Stack nearby dominates the view, rising to 1,215 feet – roughly the same height as the Empire State Building. But the park ranger got my attention when she told us that mirabilite mounds have only been seen in four places in the entire world – the Canadian Arctic, Antarctica, Central Spain, – and Utah. Just seeing them turns out to be a rare winter treat. When the air warms to 50 degrees, the mirabilite will crumble into a fine white powder and disappear.

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer — Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970)
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

My mind flashed back to a trip I’d made to the other end of the lake ten years ago. I’d just graduated from the docent training class at the Utah Museum of Fine Art, and a friend and I wanted to celebrate by having High Tea at the center of the Spiral Jetty, a 1,500 foot, long, 15 foot wide coil of black basalt rock – a stunning example of land art jutting out from the northern shore. We’d been warned that it might be underwater, but when we arrived we were delighted to find we could easily walk to the very center of the spiral as the lake water gently lapped at the edges of our shoes. We clinked our tea cups, and toasted the greatness of the lake.

Suddenly I wanted to see the jetty again, so I hopped in my car and drove to the remote site. I saw the Spiral Jetty was now high and dry. Drifting sand had already started to bury parts of it. The water’s edge was now over 300 yards away. I thought of the millions of migratory birds that would be arriving in the spring to rest and feast on the tiny treasures of the lake, the brine shrimp. I hoped a smaller lake would still be enough for all of them.

The recent words of the director of Friends of the Great Salt Lake, Lynn de Freitas, rang in my head: “The Great Salt Lake is a gift that keeps on giving. Just add water.”

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah.

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy and Copyright Kevin Colver https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections/kevin-colver
Text & Voice: Mary Heers, Generous Contributor, Utah Public Radio
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, Webmaster Bridgerland Audubon Society

Additional Reading

Mirabilite Spring Mounds Near Great Salt Lake Marina, Utah Geological Survey (UGS), Utah Department of Natural Resources, https://geology.utah.gov/popular/general-geology/great-salt-lake/mirabilite-spring-mounds/

Mirabilite, Mindat.org, Hudson Institute of Mineralogy, https://www.mindat.org/min-2725.html

Tabin, Sara, Rare salt formations return to Great Salt Lake’s shores; take a tour while they last, The Salt Lake Tribune, Jan. 13, 2021, https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/01/14/rare-salt-formations/

USGS 412613112400801 The Great Salt Lake at Spiral Jetty, Site Map for the Nation, U.S. Geological Survey(USGS), U.S. Department of the Interior, https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/nwismap/?site_no=412613112400801&agency_cd=USGS

Case, William, GEOSIGHTS: PINK WATER, WHITE SALT CRYSTALS, BLACK BOULDERS, AND THE RETURN OF SPIRAL JETTY!, Survey Notes, v. 35 no. 1, Utah Geological Survey (UGS), Utah Department of Natural Resources, January 2003, https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/geosights/spiral-jetty/

Board & Staff, Friends of the Great Salt Lake, https://www.fogsl.org/about/board-staff

Salt Lake Brine Shrimp, https://saltlakebrineshrimp.com/harvest/