The Horse

There's a horse coming in this tale, and I'm telling you now so you'll stay with me through what comes before it. Thisbe Read was born in England in the eighteen forties to a family with a small bookstore, and when she was ten they took up the Mormon faith, sold the shop, crossed the Atlantic, and joined the Martin Handcart Company, over five hundred people hauling all they owned toward Salt Lake. They left too late in the season. The blizzards found them and hundreds died, and on that road she lost her brother and got parted from her father, and she and her sister and her mother came on mostly alone. She was eleven years old when the rescue reached them. One of the rescuers was Ephraim Hanks, a man in his thirties. The park tells the next part plainly, and so will I. When she was thirteen he said he wanted to marry her. When she was sixteen he did, and she became his third wife, and for two decades, the park says, she was constantly pregnant or nursing. Brigham Young ordered the family south to Lee's Ferry, then word came they weren't needed, and Ephraim came back from scouting with talk of a pleasant creek under huge cliffs, just past the end of this road. She had never seen country like it, and it frightened her. Her son remembered a dugout there. Her own homestead papers say a one-room log home, and you can guess whose word I'd take. By her thirties she'd had twelve children and lost two as babies. She told Ephraim she wanted no more, and he respected it, and I'll give him that. Then she got a horse. She rode all over that country, herding cattle, and her son said she'd never felt more free. Ephraim died in eighteen ninety-six. Three years later she gained title to a hundred and sixty acres, in her own name. She died at Pleasant Creek in nineteen oh three, and a ranch hand burned the old house down in the nineteen forties. The big rock tower at the end of this road carries Ephraim's name. One old park survey says that when the fruit trees bloomed and the smell filled that box canyon wall to wall, it was Thisbe who named the place. A woman who'd been afraid of this country looked around and called it Floral.