On the morning of December 12, 1868, a United States Army topographic engineer named Willett Narbone walked into a room inside a natural volcanic lava tube above a cold spring on the back slope of the Wasatch Range, in a corner of Utah Territory no official map had bothered to mark, and found what he had been tracking for three days without yet knowing what it was. He found a threshold of dressed basalt set flush with the floor of the room, seven feet four inches by four feet two inches, polished to a smoothness no structure in the territory could match. Along one of its long edges ran a continuous line of marks that did not correspond to any alphabet he had ever seen in a book. He found a fresh corpse on the threshold, the body of a wagon driver named Isaac Wims, whose wagon had gone missing from Fort Bridger six days earlier.

He found an iron stall built into the natural wall of the room below the rim, with hoof scrapes and the handprints of nineteen different human occupants on the inner stone. And while he stood in the room, at the long end of the threshold opposite the corpse, holding a curved iron blade made for him by a blacksmith in Nauvoo nineteen years before, he found a man named Obed Decker, fifty-one years old, who had been excommunicated from his church ten years earlier for publishing a pamphlet about a vision that had come to him in these mountains in the summer of 1856. Captain Narbone shot Obed Decker where he stood. Obed fell forward across the threshold.

The body was retrieved the next morning. What was retrieved was not what Captain Narbone had expected. What was retrieved was Obed Decker’s clothing, intact, every button fastened. Obed Decker’s boots, laced.

Obed Decker’s hat, where it had fallen a short distance from his head. And inside the clothing, articulated in its correct order, every joint intact, every bone in its proper place, a complete human skeleton, dry. No blood, no soft tissue of any kind, no smell of death, no insect had approached the corpse in the hour before dawn. The bones were clean and dry, the color of old river stone.

Captain Narbone wrote in his official report that he could not explain what he had seen. That he had seen nothing like it in nine years of frontier service. That he had been forced to ask two members of his detachment to carry the clothed skeleton out of the room on a stretcher because he could not bring himself to touch what was inside the clothing. His report was placed in a sealed drawer in the office of the acting governor of Utah Territory on December 31, 1868.

It stayed there, unseen by any eye but the governor’s, for forty-three years. What Obed Decker was doing in that room during the ten years between his excommunication and the night Captain Narbone shot him is the subject of this account. He was not doing what the newspapers of the 1880s later claimed, when a fragment of the story leaked and was buried again. He was not running an ordinary polygamous sect of the frontier kind.

He was not punishing his wives for disobedience. He was not baptizing dead men on a slab of basalt. He was doing something older, more particular, and more deliberate than any of those things. He was feeding the threshold.

He fed it a stranger every six weeks for ten years, believing what a vision had taught him at age forty: that if the threshold were kept watered, it would eventually open onto a passage that had been sealed in these mountains since a time he did not know how to name. Obed Decker was born in Pennsylvania in the autumn of 1817, the second son of a stonemason who worked on canal locks and courthouse foundations in Lancaster and Berks counties. He learned his father’s trade from age ten. He was known in his family as a quiet boy who read the Bible twice before his twelfth year.

When his father asked him at fourteen what he thought of a passage from the Book of Enoch that the father had found in a published fragment the previous winter, Obed answered that the passage made him believe there were places in the world that had been closed by someone, waiting for another person to discover how to open them. His father wrote this remark on a separate sheet of paper kept in the back of his Bible. The paper still exists today in a private collection in Lancaster, where a folklorist from Weber State University examined it in 2006. Obed married Patience Thurston of Bucks County in 1840, when he was twenty-three.

They had two sons: Alma, born in 1839, a year before the marriage, to a woman named Lydia who died in childbirth and whom Obed never formally married, and Mahonri, born in the second year of the marriage. The family joined the Mormon church in Nauvoo, Illinois, in the summer of 1843, at the invitation of Patience’s brother-in-law, who had been baptized the previous spring. Obed worked on the Nauvoo Temple from the autumn of 1843 until its abandonment in 1846. He was present at the martyrdom of Joseph Smith in June 1844.

He walked out of Nauvoo with the main party in February 1846, crossed Iowa with the first wave of pioneer wagons, and reached the Salt Lake Valley in September 1847, forty-one days after Brigham Young’s first party arrived. His wife and two sons came the following summer with the second wave. In the territory, Obed worked as a mason on the foundation of the first temple, on the Beehive House, on a number of the first meetinghouse buildings in outlying settlements, and on a section of the Deseret territorial road. By all testimony he was a meticulous worker and a quiet man.

He read scripture aloud to his family every evening of his life. He attended the meetinghouse regularly without interruption. He paid his tithing in dressed stone when he could not pay in cash. Between 1848 and 1856 he was a Latter-day Saint in good standing, respected by his bishop and trusted by the men who employed him.

In no public document was he ever considered a dissenter or a source of trouble. In the summer of 1856, when he was thirty-nine, Obed Decker had a vision. He described it in writing on three separate occasions. The first description, the longest and the one he considered authoritative, he wrote by his own hand on the night it was revealed to him.

The second he wrote six weeks later to read to his bishop. The third he published as a small pamphlet in Salt Lake City in the spring of 1857, titled “An Account of a Place Shown to Me and the Door Which the Lord Has Kept in These Mountains. ” The pamphlet ran forty-one pages. Two hundred copies were printed at a commercial press south of the city, paid for from Obed’s own savings.

Twenty-three of the two hundred are known to survive. The vision Obed described was unusually clear in its particulars. He wrote that he went alone into the Wasatch Range on the second Saturday of August 1856, as he had done on five previous occasions over the preceding four years, to pray in a small valley behind the ridge line, which he had first entered in 1852 while surveying building-stone deposits. He wrote that the valley, which he did not name in the pamphlet and which the region later called Hemmel’s Draw after a Danish settler who briefly claimed its lower end in 1862, was a place of unusual silence.

He wrote that he heard no bird in it. He wrote that no breath of wind reached its upper parts even when the hills above were suffering strong winds. He wrote that on his fifth visit, in the summer of 1855, he had found a cold spring at the upper end of the valley, and above the spring a pile of basalt boulders, and behind them—after an afternoon spent in careful clearing—a natural chamber opening into the mountain with a floor of smooth lava and a ceiling eleven feet high at its highest point. The room was about forty feet long and twenty-three feet wide at its widest.

There was no trace of any human presence inside. No ash, no scraping, no marks on the walls, no bones of any animal that had died there. The room was clean, dry, and still, and he left it that first afternoon in 1855 with the feeling that it was a room the last user had left clean, that whoever had used it last had done so for a purpose, and that this purpose was not yet complete. He wrote that he returned to the room on the second Saturday of August 1856 to pray in it alone.

He lit a single tallow candle and set it on a natural stone shelf at the long end of the room. He knelt in the middle of the floor and opened his gospel to the fifth chapter of Enoch, which he had memorized in childhood, and began to recite it aloud. He wrote that at verse twenty-four specifically, in which Enoch is shown the paths of the moon and the secrets of the earth, he felt the floor of the room grow warm beneath his knees. He opened his eyes.

Where the floor had been bare basalt a moment before, there was now a carved stone threshold, seven feet four inches long and four feet two inches wide, polished to a smoothness no builder in the region could have made, inscribed along its long edge with marks he did not know. The threshold had not existed a moment before, but it was there now, and the flame of his candle had not flickered. He placed his hand on it. The threshold was warm to the touch, and it had a feeling under his palm like something waiting to be used.

Kneeling there with his hand on it, he understood three things at once. The first was that the threshold was a door. Not a symbol of a door, not a metaphor for a door in the way preachers use metaphors. An actual door, in the ordinary sense of an opening in a wall or floor that permits a person to move from one place to another.

The second was that the door had been closed by people who had used the room for a purpose, that those who closed it had done so at a time so distant he had no history for it and did not believe he was meant to know its date, and that they had closed it with the awareness that a later person would open it after coming to it in the right way. The third thing he understood, which would govern the next twelve years of his life, was that the right way to open the door required a particular kind of attention; that this attention required a particular kind of offering; that this offering required something living; and that this living thing was not an animal. Obed wrote in the pamphlet that he left the room that evening in complete calm; that he walked fourteen miles back to the mouth of the valley before dark; that he slept in his wagon beside the road; that he woke on the following Saturday morning, went to his meetinghouse, and took the sacrament as he always did; and that he told no one what had been revealed to him for six weeks, because he wanted to be certain of his understanding. At the end of the six weeks he went to his bishop, a man named Bishop Colfield in a ward on the north side of the city, and described the vision in his second written account.

Bishop Colfield listened. Bishop Colfield asked him certain questions. In particular, the bishop asked about the third thing he understood, which Obed wrote out for Colfield in clear and precise words. The bishop asked whether he had done anything based on that understanding.

Obed said he had not. The bishop asked him to do nothing, to tell no one, and to return in a month while the bishop sought counsel. Obed did as he was asked. The counsel came from a higher authority in the stake, and then from higher still, and finally from a man whose name appears in none of the surviving documents but who, according to every reasonable reconstruction the Weber State folklorist could make, was a member of the First Presidency in Salt Lake City in the autumn of 1856.

The counsel was to tell Obed Decker that his vision was not a true vision; that the Lord had closed whatever door might have been open in those mountains and did not intend to open another; that the understanding Obed had received about the particular kind of offering required was an illusion sent by the adversary to test him; and that he should speak of the vision to no one, visit the room no more, and continue in his calling as a builder and father and husband and Latter-day Saint in good standing. Obed received this counsel from Bishop Colfield in the front room of his own house on November 14, 1856. Obed received it. He thanked the bishop.

He returned home. He did not go back to that room that winter. In the spring of 1857, he published the pamphlet. He published it without the bishop’s permission, without the approval of any priesthood authority, and without consulting Patience.

He paid the printer $2. 40 in silver, a week’s wages, and printed two hundred copies. He distributed them himself, by hand, on the streets of Salt Lake City in the first warm week of April. He was summoned before the bishop within three days.

He was summoned before the stake president within a week. He was summoned before a disciplinary council in the last week of May. The council heard him for most of an afternoon. He did not withdraw the pamphlet.

He did not withdraw the vision. He did not withdraw his understanding concerning the offering. He only said he had seen what he had seen, that he could not now unsee it, and that he was prepared to leave the church if it asked that of him, but he would not say he had not seen what he saw. The council issued its decision on June 2, 1857.

Obed was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for publishing false doctrine, rejecting the counsel of his bishop, and refusing correction by lawful priesthood authority. The decision was final. The record of the decision remains in the ward record book to this day. In the fourteen months between June 1857 and August 1858, Obed and the twelve—Obed himself with his wife, his two sons, and the ten people who had come to him—prepared to leave the valley.

They sold what they could not carry. They settled their accounts with neighbors still on good terms with them. They loaded four wagons. They gathered tools, seed, salt, flour, iron, nails, a small charcoal stove, a small anvil, two saws, three axes, four shovels, a kettle, three iron skillets, two pots, a loom, a spinning wheel, a Bible for every adult, a hymnbook for every adult, Obed’s own copy of the pamphlet, his curved iron blade made for him by Zebediah Hawke in Nauvoo in the summer of 1849, and the vision written in Obed’s own hand.

On the morning of August 4, 1858, with the morning cold coming off the mountain and the dust not yet risen on the road, the four wagons left the valley on the road heading east and north toward the Weber Valley. From the Weber Valley they turned southeast along a Ute trail that climbed slowly through the aspens to the high country. From the high country they turned north again into a corner of the Wasatch that had no name on any printed map to that time. After eleven days of travel, they reached the mouth of a dead-end draw that did not look from the road like a passage at all.

Obed led the four wagons into it. The draw ran into the mountain for a mile and a half before opening onto a flat bench, one hundred feet wide and three hundred feet long, with a cold spring at the northern end flowing clear water from a crack in the basalt. Above the spring, cut into the hillside behind a pile of fallen stone, was the opening of the natural lava chamber Obed had seen in his vision. The bench was high enough above the valley floor that no smoke rising from it could be seen from the wagon road.

The mouth of the draw was narrow enough that two of the eleven guards on duty at the entrance could see the trail before any traveler saw them. The spring ran cold year-round. The soil on the bench was thin but produced wheat and potatoes in good years. There was timber on the hills above the bench in sufficient quantity for building, for firewood, for the small charcoal kiln Obed intended to erect for his own masonry work, and for the blade of Zebediah Hawke, which he kept in a cedar box in his wagon and which no one else in the group was permitted to touch.

The compound was built through the autumn and winter of 1858 and the spring and summer of 1859. When complete, it contained five cabins in a loose ring around a common yard, a barn built into the north wall of the bench for the four horses and two milk cows, a grain store, a smokehouse, a privy for each cabin, a small stone building near the mouth of the draw to house the guards, and a long, low stone barn with a plank roof and a single oak door fastened from the outside that Obed had built alone in eleven days in September 1859 on the lower side of the bench below the spring. He told the eleven guards that the barn was for cattle he intended to buy from a Spanish Fork trader the following spring. He bought no cattle of that kind.

The barn stood empty for ten months. In July 1860, a surveyor named Mortimer Kees, working for the Deseret Telegraph Company on a line that was never built, entered the draw alone on the twenty-second of the month looking for a way around the hill. Obed met him at the entrance, gave him supper, offered him a bed in the small building near the guards, and asked him to come up to the compound in the morning for a cup of coffee before he left. Mortimer Kees entered the compound in the morning.

He drank the coffee. He did not leave. He was the first. Obed and his elder son Alma took him from the common yard—the son holding him from behind with a hand over his mouth, while Obed walked ahead—and led him a short distance to the barn and locked the door on him.

He stayed in the barn for nineteen days. He was fed. He was watered. He was allowed to speak and allowed to pray.

Obed came to the barn three times a day, sat on a stump outside the plank door, and told Kees through the boards exactly what was going to happen to him and why. Kees screamed for the first eight days. He prayed for the next six. He was silent for the last five.

On the morning of August 11, 1860, Obed opened the barn door before dawn. He led Kees, by then too weak to resist, along the short path from the barn to the room above the spring. He took Kees through the opening in the fallen rock into the room and up to the threshold. He laid Kees on the threshold on his back.

He cut the carotid artery on the left side of his neck with a single stroke of Zebediah Hawke’s curved iron blade. Kees bled. He died within three minutes. His blood ran across the threshold toward the marks carved along the long edge.

The blood that reached the marks did not pool there. It was received, in the description Obed later wrote, in a manner he could not fully explain but said resembled the way dry earth soaks up water. The blood that did not reach the marks pooled briefly and then was drawn across the stone toward them. Within an hour of the cutting, no blood remained on the threshold.

Within four hours of the cutting, no one remained on the threshold either. There was only the place where Mortimer Kees had lain, the clothing of Mortimer Kees, buttoned, booted, his hat on the stone a short distance from where his head had been, and inside the clothing a complete, dry skeleton. Every bone in its correct place, no soft tissue of any kind, no blood, no smell. Obed left the clothing and the skeleton on the threshold until the next morning.

He went up alone before dawn on the twelfth. He removed the skeleton bone by bone in the folds of Kees’s own shirt and buried the bones in a shallow pit at the base of the fallen rock. He folded Kees’s clothing and placed it in a cedar box beside the box that held the blade. He took the clothing of each of the seventy following victims, folded it, and placed it in cedar boxes he made himself over the next ten years at the rate of roughly one box every two months.

By the time Captain Narbone entered the room in December of 1868, there were seventy-one cedar boxes in a storage room behind Obed’s cabin, each bearing on its lid, in Obed’s fine hand, a name, a date of taking, and a date for what Obed called “the receiving. ”

The vision had told Obed that the threshold required a stranger every six weeks. The vision was specific on this point, in words Obed wrote in the pamphlet that anyone could read. The offering must be a person not among the gathered people.

It must be a person who came to the valley of his own will, not one brought there against his will from outside. It must be a person who received hospitality and accepted it. It must be a person whose coming the gathered people did not expect—someone who arrived in the ordinary manner of people entering a country new to them, not someone the gathered people arranged to come. It must be a person alone, or if not alone, a person whose companions could be sent away without questions.

It must be a person no one in the valley would miss during the following forty-one days, because the threshold required six full weeks between offerings, and no new offering could be made before the previous one was fully received. And it must never, under any circumstance the vision could foresee, be one of the eleven, or any child born to them, or any Latter-day Saint in good standing. The threshold would accept none of these. The threshold wanted strangers.

Obed understood this clearly in the vision, and he never broke the rule in ten years. Between August 1860 and December 1868, Obed Decker took seventy-one strangers into the compound at Hemmel’s Draw. The full list, assembled by Weber State folklorists over eleven years from the seed-box labels, from Narbone’s December 1868 inventory, from Narbone’s private notes, from regional missing-person reports, from the records of nine wagon-freight companies out of Fort Bridger and Camp Floyd, from the records of three Methodist and two Baptist parishes in Nevada and California that recorded the names of members who set out east and were never heard from again, from the correspondence of the Bureau of Indian Affairs concerning the Shoshone bands that used the back slope as summer range, from four California family-history societies, from a sealed envelope in the papers of a Salt Lake City undertaker who had received an unsigned letter in 1871, and from oral history collected by a Weber State graduate student in 2009 from the descendants of three of the four women among the eleven, is a list that is difficult to read without stopping. It includes Mortimer Kees, surveyor, Deseret Telegraph, age 22, taken August 11, 1860.

It includes a wagon driver named Vincent Gaddis, from Fort Bridger, September 29, 1860, taken October 14. It includes a widower heading to California named Elijah Morpen, without companions, November 19, 1860, taken November 30. It includes a traveling Methodist preacher named Linus Oak, forty-seven years old, from the Snake River country, who had been circuit-riding through seven settlements and was due at the next settlement on his list on February 9, 1861, and never arrived. It includes a Shoshone man whose name is not known, taken in late winter of 1861.

It includes a couple heading to California named Ferley, husband and wife, taken together on April 11, 1861, because Obed understood from the vision that the threshold would take two if they came together as one, which Patience explained she understood from the way it received the first of the two and waited to receive the second. It includes a freight wagon driver named Harlan Bay, taken in July 1861. It includes a surveyor named Dow Osmond, taken in September. It includes a Snake River trapper named Van Ortis, taken in November 1861.

It includes seven strangers during 1862, nine in ’63, nine in ’64, nine in ’65, nine in ’66, nine in ’67, and nine in the first eleven months of ’68, before the final taking—Isaac Wims, the wagon driver whose corpse Captain Narbone found on the threshold. Among the nine in 1864 were four members of a single Shoshone family: a father named Tunop, his wife, and two children, aged six and eleven, who had crossed the Echo country that autumn on their way back from a late summer camp on the back slope. The family stopped at the compound in the ordinary manner of travelers asking for water. Obed welcomed them.

Obed had understood from the vision that the threshold would take four if they came as a family, in the same way it had taken two. The threshold received all four, in order of age, youngest to oldest, on four consecutive mornings. The father was taken on the fourth morning, after watching the other three go. This is the only event in the ten-year record that the Weber State folklorist, in her study, refused to describe in any detail beyond the fact of its occurrence.

In a footnote to that chapter, she wrote that the four cedar boxes bearing the names of the Tunop family had been burned at her request in the Fort Douglas evidence storage facility in 2007, with the written consent of the currently registered descendants of the Tunop line on the Fort Hall Reservation, who did not want the boxes to continue to exist in any publicly accessible archive. Among the nine in 1865 was a California-bound family named Venn: the father, Josiah Venn; his wife, Eulalia; two sons aged fourteen and nine; and a daughter aged seven. They had set out from Independence, Missouri, in the spring of ’65, intending to reach the Sacramento Valley by October. The family had passed through Fort Bridger on July 14.

The last person to see them was a sheepherder in Wyoming Territory on the twenty-first. They were expected at Ruby Valley Station on August 6 and did not arrive. Their disappearance led to three separate searches by the overland mail company and by the family in California over fourteen years, and to a private memorial pamphlet printed by Ambrose Venn, Josiah’s brother in Stockton, California, in 1879, titled “Lost Between Fort Bridger and Ruby Valley, a Family That Vanished. ” The pamphlet is held in the Bancroft Library at the University of California.

It was the document that first allowed the Weber State folklorist, when she found it in 2003, to place a five-member California-bound family in the Echo list and to begin the process of matching the cedar-box labels at Hemmel’s Draw against the disappearance record of the nineteenth-century West. During the ten years the compound operated, the main body of the church was not entirely unaware of its existence. The 1857 pamphlet had been read by every bishop in the valley when it was published. By the end of June of that year, every bishop in the valley knew the outcome of the disciplinary council.

The departure of Obed in August of ’58 with eleven followers in four wagons was recorded. So was the direction of their departure. And it had been noted that no settlement under Obed’s name had been established anywhere in the territory, as far as the main body knew. The question of what Obed Decker was doing with his eleven followers in some corner of the back slope had been generally known to the First Presidency since the autumn of ’59 onward.

The First Presidency did not consider it an urgent matter. The church had larger problems in those years: the approach of the federal army under Albert Sidney Johnston in ’57 and the Utah War that followed; the Mountain Meadows Massacre of September ’57 and its slow revelation; the nature of the church’s relationship with the federal government in the aftermath; and the ordinary work of settlement and sending missionaries abroad. Obed Decker had been excommunicated. His followers had been permitted to leave.

If they were doing something of their own in the remote country, that was between them and the Lord. In the summer of 1864, however, a letter reached the First Presidency’s office from the widow of a Snake River trapper in the Idaho country, a woman named Harriet Van Ortis, whose husband had set out from Soda Springs in November ’61 and never returned. Harriet had been writing letters to the Deseret News and to the offices of various freight companies for three years. She had received no reply.

In the spring of ’64, she met a Spanish trader at an inn at a crossroads in Malad City who told her over dinner that two years earlier he had refused to go up a certain draw on the back slope settled by a group of Mormons, because the horse he was riding refused to enter it. The trader gave Harriet the direction of the draw as best he could remember it. Harriet wrote a careful letter in a deliberate hand to the First Presidency in Salt Lake City, describing what the trader had said and asking whether the church knew of any Mormon settlement in that country, and whether any effort had been made to inquire about her husband there. The letter reached the First Presidency’s office on August 11, 1864.

It is preserved today in a file in the Church History Library that remained closed to researchers until 1998. The letter was read. Quiet instructions were issued from the First Presidency’s office to a stake president in the Weber Valley, a man named Hiram Driggs, forty-four years old, a convert from upstate New York who had crossed the plains with the second wave in ’48 and had served as stake president since ’57. Driggs was instructed to form a small group of trusted priesthood holders to go into the back ranges and look for the Decker settlement, if it existed; to inquire discreetly about a Snake River trapper named Van Ortis; and to return a quiet report of what they found.

He was ordered not to confront Obed Decker, not to attempt any disciplinary action, and not to speak of the mission to anyone outside his group. He was given no authority to act on anything he saw. He was told only to look and return. Driggs set out in the second week of September 1864 with four other men, all members of his stake, all experienced in the region.

They left Ogden on the fourteenth, crossed the river at the usual ford, climbed into the aspen country, and reached the back slope on the eighteenth. They spent the next five days combing a stretch of ground that no official map had bothered to delineate, following the trader’s description that Harriet Van Ortis had sent them in a copy. On the morning of September 23, they reached the mouth of a dead-end draw that did not look like a natural passage. Driggs, in the lead, asked his group whether they thought this was the place or whether they should ride on.

The second man in his command, Elon Bagley, said he did not think it was the intended place, that it was just a draw and nothing more, and that they should ride two more miles north before turning back. Driggs agreed. They passed the mouth of Hemmel’s Draw and did not enter it. They returned to Ogden on September 27.

Driggs reported to the First Presidency’s office on the thirtieth that his group had been unable to locate any settlement in the described area, that he believed no such settlement existed, and that the trader’s story was probably a confusion with another draw farther south. The report was filed. Harriet Van Ortis’s letter was filed with it. No further action was taken.

In August of 1866, Driggs received a second instruction. This one came in person, carried by a priesthood official who rode from Salt Lake City to Ogden to speak to Driggs in his sitting room. The official did not sit. He stood by the stove.

He told Driggs that a second letter had reached the First Presidency’s office. It was from a Methodist bishop in Boise inquiring about the whereabouts of a circuit rider named Linus Oak, missing since February ’61, whose last known location was in the general range of the back slope. The official told Driggs that the First Presidency had decided to make another attempt to locate the Decker settlement, in the hope of being able to answer the Methodist bishop’s inquiry truthfully, and that Driggs was to go back into that country with a larger group, this time on foot through the lower valleys that a mounted party might miss. The official told Driggs he was again charged to inquire quietly, to avoid any confrontation, and to return a clear report.

The official left Driggs’s house without taking any refreshment. Driggs stayed awake most of that night. He wrote in his private journal that he had not wanted to go there the first time, that he wanted to go now even less, and that he had a feeling he could not explain and was not comfortable with: that there was something in the back-slope country that did not want anyone to see it, and that he did not want to be the man who saw it. He set out on August 4, 1866, with seven other men—three who had been on the ’64 trip and four new to the group.

They crossed the Weber as before. They climbed into the aspen country as before. They came out on the back slope on the eighth day. On the morning of August 11, they rode their horses along the trail to the mouth of Hemmel’s Draw.

This time they did not pass it by. This time Driggs reined in his horse and sat looking at the mouth of the draw for nearly twenty minutes. Then he said to his group: “We will go in on foot. We will leave the horses here with Elam, and we will go up and see what is there.

”

The seven men who were to go dismounted. Elam took the reins of the eight horses and backed them twenty yards down the trail. Driggs and the other six entered the mouth of the draw. They walked about two hundred yards.

Driggs stopped. He stopped because the two youngest men in his group—both in their early twenties, both experienced priesthood holders, both chosen by him for steadiness of nerve—had begun to weep without any clear cause. They were not weeping from grief. They were not weeping from a fear they could name.

They were weeping in the way Driggs described in his journal, which the Weber State folklorist read in 2003 in the Church History Library archive, in the exact phrase: they were weeping as men weep when asked for something they can neither refuse nor bear. Driggs looked at them. He looked at his four other men, who were not weeping but stood in complete stillness. He looked back toward Elam, about a hundred yards behind them with the horses.

He saw that all eight horses had stopped moving. He saw they were not grazing at all. He saw they were not shifting their stance. He saw that all eight were facing the mouth of the draw, ears forward, nostrils flared, and that none of them had taken a step in any direction since Elam had backed them twenty yards.

Driggs turned around. He walked his group back out of the draw. He mounted his horse. He gave the order to return to Ogden.

He reported to Brigham Young personally on August 16, 1866, in Brigham Young’s office in Salt Lake City. He told Brigham Young what had happened in the draw. He told him he had been within what he believed was half a mile of some kind of structure. He told him he had turned back because his two youngest men had begun to weep without cause, because the horses would not go forward, and because he had felt something in his body he could not describe.

Brigham Young listened. Brigham Young asked some questions. Brigham Young asked Driggs whether he had seen any cabin, any smoke, any trace of human presence. Driggs said he had seen nothing.

Brigham Young asked whether he believed the settlement he had been sent to find was in the draw he had just left. Driggs said he believed it was. Brigham Young was silent for some time. Then he told Driggs that the matter should be left alone; that the region would grow over time large enough for a party of federal men to stumble onto the place in the ordinary way federal men find things; and that the church would not enter that draw again.

He told Driggs to tell no one what had happened in the draw, to answer the Methodist bishop in Boise with the simple truth that no trace of the circuit rider had been found on the back slope. He told him these instructions were to remain secret until Brigham Young’s own death. Driggs complied. He wrote it nowhere until 1903, when he was in his eighties and knew he was dying.

He wrote it then, in the final entry of his private journal, which he directed in his will to be deposited in the Church History Library and sealed for forty-five years from the date of his death. He died in 1906. The journal was opened in 1951. The Weber State folklorist was the first researcher outside the church granted permission to read it, in 2003.

Captain Willett Narbone was a topographic engineer in the United States Army, a West Point graduate of the class of 1857 who served in Oregon and the Dakota country before the war. He served in the war itself with the Army of the Cumberland, returned after the surrender to the Topographical Corps, and was assigned to Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City in the summer of 1867. He was thirty-three years old in December of ’68. He was in the back-slope country with a detachment of twelve men on a routine mapping assignment to establish a baseline for a proposed road that was never built.

On December 9, he made his detachment camp in a sheltered hollow a few miles from the mouth of what he would later learn was Hemmel’s Draw. On the morning of December 10, one of his mules—a middle-aged female named Delilah, who had been with the detachment for two years and had never strayed—disappeared from the picket line. Narbone sent a sergeant and a private to look for her. They returned at noon without her.

Narbone, a cautious man who did not part with his property willingly, took a corporal named Bell and went out himself in the afternoon. They followed the mule’s tracks west along a sheep trail that climbed slowly over a shoulder of hill. The tracks were clear in light snow that had fallen during the night. The mule was moving at an unhurried pace.

She had not run. She had not been chased. She had strayed of her own accord, in a direction she had never taken before. The tracks crossed the rocky shoulder, dropped into a shallow valley, climbed out, crossed a second shoulder, and dropped again into the mouth of a dead-end draw that Captain Narbone described in his official report as a passage that did not look like a valley at all, and that he would not have entered had the choice been his.

The mule’s tracks went directly into the mouth of the draw and did not come out. Captain Narbone and Corporal Bell followed them. The draw opened onto a valley at a bend about a quarter mile in. The valley continued to rise slowly for another mile and a half.

The mule’s tracks led up it. At the upper end of the valley, where it opened onto a flat bench, Captain Narbone saw a cold spring. Above the bench overlooking the spring, he saw a thread of wood smoke. He saw cabins.

He saw a barn built into the north wall. He saw a stone building like a watchtower standing empty. He saw no people in the yard between the cabins. He saw the mule standing quietly beside the spring, drinking.

Captain Narbone and Corporal Bell dismounted. They walked up toward the bench. They called out. No one answered.

They walked between two of the cabins. They entered the common yard. Still no one answered. They searched the five cabins one by one.

The cabins were empty of people. They were not empty of possessions. Each cabin was fully furnished, with made beds, cold stoves in which wood had been laid but not lit for the day, partially prepared meals in the kitchens, open gospels on tables, hymnbooks on shelves, children’s wooden toys on the floors of two of the cabins—with the usual signs in every cabin of a household in the middle of its morning. In the largest cabin, which Narbone later learned belonged to Obed, he found the storage room.

He opened the storage room door. He looked inside. He wrote in his official report that the storage room contained seventy-one small cedar boxes, stacked in rows on wooden shelves from floor to ceiling, each bearing a label on its lid in fine handwriting: a name, a date of taking, and a date for what the labels called “the receiving. ” He wrote that he read a sample of these labels.

He wrote that one label bore the name “Elijah Morpen,” which he knew as the name of a widower heading to California whose disappearance had been reported in the Deseret News in 1861—a man Narbone remembered by habit of his profession, reading the territory’s papers for anything relating to the region in which he worked. He wrote that he closed the storage room door. He wrote that he and Corporal Bell then went out of the cabin into the yard and stood for some time trying to understand what they had walked into. While they stood there, they heard a sound from above the spring.

They turned. They saw a woman coming down from an opening in the pile of rock above the spring. She was about forty-five years old. She wore a long gray dress.

She carried an empty metal basin. She did not see them at first, because she was coming down with her back to them. When she turned at the end of the path and saw them, she did not scream. She did not run.

She set the basin carefully on a flat stone. She said, in an ordinary voice: “You had better go up and see him. ”

Captain Narbone asked her who she was. She said her name was Patience Decker, that she was Obed Decker’s wife, that her husband was in the room above the spring, and that she had been fetching a basin of water that would be needed later.

Captain Narbone asked her what she meant by “later. ” She said her husband was taking a man today, that he had been in the room since before dawn, that the taking was now complete, that the receiving was underway, that it would be finished within the hour, and that she had come down to begin preparations for the next thing. Captain Narbone asked her what the next thing was. She said that was between her husband and the Lord.

She asked Captain Narbone to come up with her. She said her husband would want to meet him. Captain Narbone drew his sidearm. He told Corporal Bell to stay in the yard and detain the woman.

He climbed the path alone, climbed the pile of rock, and entered through the opening. He stepped into the room. By the light of a single tallow candle burning on a natural stone shelf at the long end of the room, he saw the polished basalt threshold set into the floor. He saw, lying on the threshold on his back, the corpse of a man he would learn within the hour was Isaac Wims, a wagon driver from Fort Bridger, taken on December 6.

And he saw, standing behind the corpse at the long end of the threshold, a man of about fifty in a plain gray shirt and black trousers, holding in his right hand a curved iron blade about eight inches long. The man looked up when Captain Narbone entered. The man did not raise the blade. The man did not speak.

The man watched Captain Narbone cross the ten feet between the entrance and the beginning of the threshold. The man watched Captain Narbone stop. The man watched Captain Narbone raise his sidearm. The man closed his eyes.

Captain Narbone shot him once in the chest. The man fell forward over the body of Isaac Wims on the threshold. The blade fell from his hand and rang once on the stone. Captain Narbone stood in place for about thirty seconds.

Then he backed out of the room. He walked down the path. He secured the compound with Corporal Bell’s help. He returned to his detachment that evening with the news that they would camp on the bench for the next few days.

The next morning, December 13, before dawn, Captain Narbone took three men and a canvas stretcher and climbed the path to the room. He had slept perhaps two hours. He had written the first four pages of his official report by lamplight in Obed’s cabin after supper. He had instructed Corporal Bell to guard the storeroom and Patience Decker, who was placed in a locked bedroom in the cabin that had belonged to one of the bachelors of the compound.

He had directed the detachment surgeon, Dr. Vernon Rypon, to be ready in the room at first light. He wanted Rypon to see what he had seen before anything was moved. They entered the room as the first gray light of morning reached the opening in the pile of rock.

The candle on the shelf had burned down and gone out. The room was nearly dark. Captain Narbone had brought two lamps. He lit one and set it on the shelf.

Dr. Rypon lit the second and set it on the floor at the beginning of the threshold. The threshold was clean. There was no blood on it.

There was no corpse on it. On the threshold lay the clothing of Isaac Wims, intact, every button fastened, his boots laced, and inside the clothing a complete, dry, articulated human skeleton. Every bone in its correct place, every joint intact. No soft tissue, no blood, no smell of death.

Beside the clothed skeleton of Isaac Wims, intermingled with it and beside it, lay the clothing of Obed Decker in exactly the same condition. Obed’s gray shirt was intact. Obed’s black trousers were intact. Obed’s boots were laced.

Obed’s hat rested a short distance from where his head had been. The bullet hole in the chest of Obed’s shirt was visible. There was no blood around the bullet hole. And inside Obed’s clothing there was a second complete, dry, articulated human skeleton.

Dr. Rypon, who had served as a surgeon in the Army of the Potomac for three years and had seen things no one should see, bent down to examine the two skeletons. He touched the collar of Obed’s shirt. He opened the collar.

He looked at the skeleton inside it. He rose slowly. He left the room without a word. He stood outside the opening for perhaps ten minutes before Captain Narbone joined him.

Dr. Rypon said to Captain Narbone: “Captain, I will sign anything you ask of me, but I will not describe in writing, in my own hand, what is in that room, because I do not know the words that describe it correctly. ”

Captain Narbone said he understood, that he would describe it himself in his official report, and that Dr. Rypon’s signature would be required only on the two death certificates—Isaac Wims and Obed Decker.

Dr. Rypon thanked him. He returned to the compound. Captain Narbone remained in the room for nearly an hour.

He walked around the threshold. He examined the marks along the long edge. He wrote in his official report that the marks appeared to him to be a kind of writing, but not in any alphabet he had ever seen, and that he did not attempt to copy them because during the half hour he spent examining them he felt it was unwise to put them on paper and take the paper out of the room. He wrote that this was a matter of instinct, not reasoned judgment, and that he did not expect any reader of the report to believe that instinct.

He wrote that he had nevertheless obeyed it, and that no copy of the marks had left the room on any paper. He wrote that this instinct was the only occasion in nine years of frontier service on which he had refused a professional duty on a ground he could not justify in writing. He wrote that he did not regret the refusal. The two skeletons were carried out of the room on the stretcher later that morning.

They were placed under a tarpaulin in the barn, the detachment not disturbing their clothing. The eleven survivors of the compound—Patience Decker, Obed’s sons Alma and Mahonri, and the eight other adult followers—were arrested on Captain Narbone’s authority as a federal officer in the territory and transported under guard to Fort Douglas, arriving December 21. The seventy-one cedar boxes were loaded on two wagons and carried with them. The curved iron blade was wrapped in cloth and carried separately, in Captain Narbone’s own saddlebag.

The two skeletons, in clothing, were transported in sealed pine coffins made by Corporal Bell and a private at the compound over the 13th and 14th. Isaac Wims was buried at Fort Douglas on the 23rd. Obed Decker was buried in an unmarked grave on the 24th, in a corner of the Fort Douglas cemetery that now lies beneath a Veterans Affairs hospital parking lot. The compound was burned to the ground on March 15, 1869, by a federal detachment under Lieutenant Osgood, who received written orders to leave no standing structure above waist height.

Lieutenant Osgood’s orders also required that the room be blasted and sealed with dynamite. Four charges were prepared by an army engineer named Elias Pitt, twenty-seven years old, originally from Pennsylvania. Pitt entered the room on the morning of March 16 and placed three charges along the walls—two on the long north wall and one on the short east wall at the end opposite the opening. He did not place the fourth charge, intended for the long south wall directly above the threshold.

He left the room. He told Lieutenant Osgood he would not go back inside. Lieutenant Osgood asked him why. Pitt said he could not place a charge over the threshold itself; that he had been able to place the other three along the walls because he had not had to stand directly on the threshold, but that the fourth charge required him to kneel on the threshold itself, and he was unable to do that.

Lieutenant Osgood pressed him. Pitt said he would resign his commission before he would kneel on it. Lieutenant Osgood did not press him further. The three charges that had been placed were detonated at four in the afternoon of March 16.

One of the three exploded; the other two did not. The one that exploded was the charge on the short east wall. It brought down the ceiling of the east end of the room. The falling rock sealed the opening completely under forty feet of basalt rubble.

The threshold, at the opposite end of the room from the blast, was unaffected. It remained in place under the rubble below the mountain, and it remains in place today, exactly where it was. The eleven surviving members of the compound were held at Fort Douglas through the winter and tried in a federal territorial court in Salt Lake City in April 1869. The trial was conducted largely in closed session, with Narbone, Bell, and Dr.

Rypon testifying behind locked doors. In the final judgment, issued April 27, Alma Decker, thirty, and Mahonri Decker, twenty-seven, pleaded guilty as accessories to first-degree murder in the case of Isaac Wims, and in each of the seventy prior killings of which Obed had kept records. They were sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was never carried out.

On the night of January 29—in the second month of their imprisonment in the territorial prison—Alma and Mahonri Decker hanged themselves in two adjacent cells, using strips of blanket, within the same hour. The night guard, a man named Fer Willoughby, found them during the morning count. He wrote in his daily report that the brothers were found facing the partition wall between their cells, that the blanket strips were tied to the cell window bar in both cases, and that both men had removed their boots and placed them neatly side by side at the foot of the cell bed before doing it. Patience Decker, forty-eight, pleaded guilty as an accessory to second-degree murder in each of the seventy-one killings and was sentenced to life in the territorial prison.

She served seven years. She died in her cell on August 11, 1876, of what the prison physician recorded as old age. She was buried in the prison cemetery. The eight other adult followers—three men and five women—received sentences ranging from four to twenty years.

Three of the men died in prison between 1870 and 1873: two of cholera in the 1870 outbreak that killed thirty-one prisoners, the third of a knife wound inflicted by another prisoner in a dispute of which the warden kept no record. The five women survived their sentences. By 1880, all five had been released. Three, as a condition of parole, agreed to leave the territory.

Two of the three went to the Snake River plain in Idaho and settled under married names in small farming communities west of Pocatello. The third went to western Oregon and vanished from the records within two years, appearing in no census, church record, or newspaper for the rest of the nineteenth century. The remaining two women stayed in the territory. One in a boarding house in Ogden, where she lived to eighty-one and died in 1910, never speaking of what she had seen at Hemmel’s Draw.

The other in a small house in Provo, where she died of pneumonia in 1894. Of the three women who went to the Snake River plain and Oregon, one left a document. Her name became Burrows after her marriage to a settler named Josiah Burrows in 1881. Her name in the compound had been Jerusha Rock.

She was thirty years old when the compound was taken. She lived with her husband and six children on a wheat farm west of Pocatello for thirty years. She never spoke of Hemmel’s Draw to her husband, who died in 1908. She never spoke of it to any of her children.

In the autumn of 1911, when she was seventy-two and had been a widow for three years, she wrote a letter in a fine hand reflecting her training in the Deseret Alphabet school of her childhood. She placed it in a sealed envelope addressed to the Idaho State Historical Society in Boise, with written instructions on the envelope to open it upon her death and not before. She placed the sealed envelope in a cedar box in the top drawer of her bedroom dresser and wrote a note to her eldest son telling him where to find it in the event of her death. She died in September 1927, at eighty-eight, of complications from a broken hip.

Her eldest son found the letter where she had said. He mailed it to the Idaho State Historical Society. It was opened in Boise on October 11, 1927. It is preserved today in a locked drawer.

Eight researchers have been allowed to read it. The Weber State folklorist was the fifth. The contents have never been published in full in any printed source, out of respect for an agreement reached between the historical society and Jerusha’s descendants in 1973. The one paragraph quoted in the folklorist’s study, with the descendants’ permission, comes near the end.

It reads: “I was in the compound all eleven years, and I knew what was being done, and I did not stop it, and I helped in the simple ways I was asked to help. I will not now claim that I did not know, or that I did not help, or that I was a prisoner of those men. I was there of my own choice from the first day to the day the captain came up the path. And if I am asked on judgment day why I did not leave, I will have no answer that will satisfy any ear, including my own.

I write this now because my youngest of six children was born in that compound on the morning of a spring day in 1865, between the taking of the Venn family in July of that year and the Shoshone family of the year before, and she is now a mother herself, and she does not know, and will never know, and I want it written somewhere in this country, away from her name and her hearing, that the ground under that compound was wrong, and that my husband and I knew it was wrong, and that we stayed anyway. ”

The daughter born in the spring of 1865—the cause of this letter, referred to in it only as “the youngest”—lived to ninety-one and died in Twin Falls in 1956, after a career as a schoolteacher and final years as a grandmother of eleven grandchildren. She never knew the circumstances of her birth. The letter was opened twenty-nine years after her mother’s death and twenty-two years before her own.

The official report of Captain Willett Narbone, sealed on December 31, 1868, in the office of acting territorial governor Charles Durkee, remained in that drawer through the administrations of eleven successive governors. It was opened on May 4, 1911, by Governor William Spry, in office less than two months, who had been told of the drawer and the report by his predecessor in a private briefing on the day of transition of power. Spry read the report. He wrote a brief note and placed it with the report in the drawer.

The note read: “This remains sealed until there is in this office a man who can judge what should be done with it, and I am not that man. ”

The drawer was opened again in 1953 by Governor J. Bracken Lee, who read the note, read the report, wrote his own note, and closed the drawer. His note read: “Spry was right.

”

The drawer was opened once more in 1977 by Governor Scott M. Matheson, who read all three documents, wrote nothing, and transferred the entire file to the Utah State Archives. The report was declassified in 1986 under a general order to release documents relating to pre-1900 territorial records. It has been read since 1986 by roughly sixty-three researchers.

The land on which the compound stood was incorporated into a national forest in 1912. The lower draw was included in that transfer. The upper draw, the bench, and the collapsed room above the spring were included in the transferred land without any indication of what that land was, or what lay beneath the mountain at its upper end. The lower draw had been largely abandoned since the burning of the compound in 1869.

Forden’s Crossing, a small settlement at the mouth of the draw where the Danish settler Hemmel had briefly lived in 1862, was deserted by 1879 and stripped for timber by 1888. The road leading to the mouth of the draw was overgrown with sagebrush within a generation. In the autumn of 1931, a Civilian Conservation Corps crew from a camp near Nephi was sent into the back-slope country to survey a potential fire road across what Forest Service maps then called Hemmel Draw. The crew worked on the survey for eleven days.

On the eleventh day, the crew’s lead surveyor, a man named Alvin Meskall, forty-one years old, from Nephi, took a sidearm from the camp’s stores that evening, walked into the sagebrush above the camp, and shot himself. His body was found the next morning. The crew did not continue the survey. The fire road was never built.

The Forest Service file on the survey, obtained by the folklorist in 2007 through a routine public-records request, states plainly that the crew was unable to maintain its course, that the lead surveyor had ended his life, and that the project had been administratively terminated. The file contains no further details. The folklorist, who interviewed Meskall’s two surviving nieces in Nephi in 2008, both in their eighties, learned that their uncle came down off the back slope on October 9, 1931, and told their father, Meskall’s younger brother, that he had been to a place he would not return to for any pay, that he did not want to live in a country that contained such a place, and that he would end the trouble of knowing it. The nieces had been small children in 1931.

Their father told them these words on his deathbed in 1971, and they kept them to themselves until the folklorist, with proper letters of introduction and long patience, got them to speak. Dr. Margit Hoggard, of the Department of Folklore and Oral History at Weber State University, began work on compiling the record of Hemmel’s Draw in 1998, when she first read a reference to the Obed Decker pamphlet of 1857 in a footnote to an article on Mormon studies about failed schismatic movements in the remote country of the pre-polygamy era. The footnote was two sentences long.

The article’s author had never read the pamphlet and was working from a secondary citation in a 1923 bibliography. Dr. Hoggard found a copy of the pamphlet in her own institution’s special collections, inside a box that had not been opened in forty-one years. She read it in a single afternoon.

She made a list of the people, places, and events mentioned in it. She began writing letters. The letters continued over the following twenty-one years—to the Church History Library, the Utah State Archives, the Bancroft Library, the Idaho State Historical Society, the Fort Hall Reservation tribal council, the Bureau of Indian Affairs correspondence file at the Smithsonian, the overland mail company archive, nine separate California family-historical societies, the records of the U. S.

Army Corps of Topographical Engineers at the National Archives, the Methodist Episcopal Church archive in Nashville, the descendants of the Salt Lake City undertaker in San Diego, the Deseret News archive, the Weber Valley State records, and the private papers of nine nineteenth-century Western figures held by individuals in six states. Her study, “The Hemmel’s Draw Papers,” was published by the University of Utah Press in May 2019. It runs 411 pages. Its appendix contains the complete list of seventy-one names, with dates of taking and dates of what Decker called the receiving, cross-referenced against every independent record Dr.

Hoggard was able to find. It contains the first published edition of Captain Narbone’s December 1868 report. It contains the first published summary of Hiram Driggs’s journal, by written permission of the Church History Library. It contains the quoted paragraph from Jerusha Rock Burrows’s 1911 letter, by written permission of the Idaho State Historical Society and the family.

It contains no photograph of the threshold, because the room remains sealed under forty feet of basalt and has not been reopened. Because Dr. Hoggard has stated in interviews that she does not endorse reopening it in her lifetime, or in any age she can foresee. The ground above the room lies today in a corner of a national forest in a county of Utah.

The rocky bench where the five cabins once stood is now timberland. The spring still flows cold from the crack in the basalt. The pile of basalt rubble that sealed the room in March 1869 has been covered, over 157 years, by lichen, scrub oak, and the slow soil that mountains make. The opening is not visible from any trail.

No trail reaches the bench. A hiker who knows exactly where to look can find the spring and can find the rubble, and can spend an afternoon walking around it without realizing what lies beneath it. There is no Forest Service sign at the site. The county keeps no record of the site in any public document.

The polished basalt threshold—seven feet four inches by four feet two inches, smooth to a degree no builder in the region could match, inscribed along one edge with marks that correspond to no alphabet—remains in place beneath the rubble, exactly where Obed Decker first saw it in the summer of 1856. Exactly where he fed it seventy-one strangers in the ten years between 1860 and 1868. Exactly where it has remained, waiting for the next person to approach it in the way it understands as the correct way, through all the time since the dynamite failed to break it—157 years and ten months, as of now.

And no later arrival has broken it, which is the only true measure of a thing of this kind: the length of time it has been willing to wait.