Little City, Big History

Wendover, Nevada

The Great Salt Lake and Bonneville Salt Flats are part of the 110 mile drive from Salt Lake City, Utah, to the little border town of Wendover.

My brother works here dealing Texas Holdem at the "Nugget" from 1 AM to sometime after dawn. Colonel Paul Tibbets trained here in 1945 with one of the 15 specially modified "silverplate" B-29s that could carry the "little boy" or "fatman" atomic bombs.

You have to wonder at the black humor or wartime insanity that would lead the Colonel to name such an instrument of death after his mother, Enola Gay.

They spent a lot of time dropping 10,000 pound "pumpkins" around the wilds of Wendover and on Japan in single plane missions before dropping the "little boy" on Hiroshima". The picture below shows a "fatman" being loaded into the bomb bay of a modified B-29 (Modified bomb bay, no armor, no defensive machine guns).

Kit Carson sent smoke signals from Pilot Mountain in 1846 to assure pioneers that there was safe passage. The Salt Flats can turn to mush after heavy rain. Perhaps that's what bogged down the Donner Party before they turned to cannibalism 400 miles further west in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

The distances in Nevada are deceiving. There are these endless valleys between mountain ranges that appear to be short distances but are miles further than the eye leads you to believe.

Once (about 1980) my brother had a farm 30 miles down a dirt road in one such endless valley. A Mormon settler had somehow built a wooden aqueduct from Pilot Mountain down to the farm that ended in a big pond full of trout. My brother would open a valve and flood his alfalfa fields (sometimes picking up a rainbow trout on an alfalfa row). He had to move out and move his house trailer to some acres he bought near the farm. Vandals knocked out all his windows and burned it all to the ground. They didn't burn his old van, but they did break all the windows.

The Donner Party and Sentinel Chickens

nner Wendover, Nevada

We've covered some territory in the last few days. The RV is back in Moab, Utah. We drove the Toyota 100 miles over the Great Salt Lake desert to Wendover, Nevada to see my brother. He took us out into the desert to see a little lake or spring that percolates up at the base of a mountain range.


You can tell a poison spring in the desert by the lack of insects and other life. Many of them are full of arsenic or selenium. This one was full of little fish and mosquitoes. They put "sentinel chickens" near some of the springs so they can test them for West Nile virus.


Later we walked out onto the Bonneville Salt Flats. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) prepares a strip 80 feet wide by ten miles long for world land speed record attempts every year after the salt dries. When the salt is wet, it's like driving on porridge.

We found a place 25 miles out in the desert on an empty gravel road where the Donner party crossed the salt flats and drove their wagons up over a low pass. That's the party that got stranded in the mountains for the winter (because they got stuck in the salt and delayed) and revived the practice of cannibalism.





After we left Wendover we went in to Salt Lake City. We went to Temple Square and saw a two-hour movie about Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormon religion. The movie showed Smith finding a loose-leaf binder filled with gold pages. The binder was full of revelations. It was in a language that only Smith could understand. Smith established the Mormon religion and moved his congregation around the country (New York, Illinois, Missouri). Apparently the Mormons were persecuted everywhere and Smith was killed by intolerant neighbors in Carthage, Missouri. Then Brigham Young took over the church leadership and moved the Mormons to Salt Lake City. Mormons have reputation as hard-working people who shun alcohol, gambling and tobacco. They have a strong evangelical tradition.

Then we caught a plane and flew here (North Carolina) to visit our six grandchildren.