The Man Under the Lake

Keep an eye on any man who runs off a horse thief and then keeps the fellow's cabin. That was Cass Hite, September of eighteen eighty-three, at a ford on the Colorado, down past Hanksville, that folks called Dandy Crossing because that's what it was. Hite invited the thief, one Joshua Swett, to leave, moved his cabin closer to the river, and went to work on the gold a Navajo headman had shown him, the park's overview says, by one telling to send him elsewhere. Word got out, prospectors came by the hundred, and that December nine of them wrote up a mining district with a boundary along this same Waterpocket Fold. In eighteen ninety-one a rival named Kohler set up a company named close enough to Hite's to fool Denver investors, and Hite took out newspaper ads and shamed him. Hite stepped off the train at Green River that September, two friends told him Kohler was laying for him, and he walked on over to the Gammage Rooming House anyway. Kohler sat on the porch with a Winchester. There were words, the rifle cracked and just missed Hite's head, and Hite, by a river man's telling, wore a forty-five with the barrel sawed down to one inch, and he had only to swing the holster up and shoot through the bottom. Kohler went out of his chair dying. Hite walked back to his cabin and the sheriff came for him there. One jury hung. The next gave him twelve years. Inside a year tuberculosis had him marked for dead, the governor pardoned him, and a freighter hauled him to Hanksville, little more than a hundred pounds by the local stories, for friends to nurse. He lived. He vowed he'd stay in those canyons the rest of his days, and he set out grapes and watermelons at Ticaboo and hardly left them, and in nineteen fourteen the river men buried him by his cabin. Then the dam went in, and the water came up over the vines, over the cabin, over the crossing. Some still evening on Lake Powell you'll find a houseboat drifting and a radio going, and under the hull, however high the lake stands that year, Cass Hite, keeping his word.