The Cable

The first rider was a dog. He rode a load of lumber two thousand feet down a cliff, the Flanigan family dog did, and William Flanigan said he was "real scart" at the bottom. You won't see that cliff from this road. It's out on the rim of the big canyon. William's brother David was fifteen, hunting the East Rim with three other boys, when he stood at the top of it with the big yellow pines around him. Around eighteen sixty-three, with settlers short of boards for their floors, Brigham Young had told a meeting that lumber would come down that canyon one day by the hundreds of thousands of feet. The wise heads figured he'd missed that one. Flanigan grew up and strung fifty thousand feet of what the Park Service calls baling wire over drums and pulleys. By about nineteen oh one, lumber was coming down. By Christmas of nineteen oh six, two hundred thousand feet. A young fellow with a survey party, Quinby Stewart, said that if they'd bring watermelons to the foot of the wire, he'd ride down and help eat them. They brought the melons. He came down on the lumber in two minutes. Frank Petty ran the sawmill on top. He weighed close to three hundred pounds and hated the trail, so he took to commuting by lumber. One day his load hit the rim and the chain let go at one end. His son, at the brakes, stopped it with a few inches of lumber still on the edge. There hung the old man, too scared to twitch, the better part of two thousand feet of air under him. The son climbed out underneath that load, fixed the chain, and let his father down easy, all the way to the bottom. J.L. Crawford remembered Dave Flanigan years on, stopping by in an open car, selling a little booklet about his cable for twenty-five cents. I'd give a good horse for one of those booklets. Crawford's father got his for a quarter, from the fellow who let a forest down a cliff on baling wire.