In these days of bumper-to-bumper, 75-mile-per-hour traffic, we whine about occasional traffic jams that stop modern vehicles in their tracks. Early Utah Valley travelers using slow animal-drawn vehicles seldom worried about that inconvenience, but they were concerned about another type of jam -- the ice jam.

The Territorial Road through Utah County (it later became Highways 89 and 91) served as Utah Valley's best and only thoroughfare for most of the year. However, during the winter, when snow, ice and deep ruts made the Territorial Road virtually impassible, Utah Lake became the valley's highway of ice.

Early colonists who found it necessary to travel during frigid weather could reach most Utah Valley settlements via the ice on Utah Lake. But the ice highway had another important purpose. It became the most traveled road to the mountains west of Utah Lake. Lake Mountain served as one of Utah Valley's main sources of winter fuel and fence posts for the last half of the 19th century.

During their first years of settlement, Utah Valley's colonists generally heated their cabins with sagebrush and wood that was available locally. There were three large groves of juniper trees (most Utahns call them cedars) on the Provo Bench near where Utah Valley State College is located today. The trees in these groves provided for settlers' fuel needs until the junipers had all been chopped down, and then people were forced to travel farther for wood. As the valley's population increased, the number of wood hauling trips did too.

As early as 1852, one group of Springville men crossed the lake nine times to get wood. Davis Clark was one of those men. Concerning these and other wood gathering trips, Clark later remembered, "We often suffered from the cold camping out."

Extreme camping

Albert and Samuel S. Jones left Great Britain and came to the Great Basin with the Martin Handcart Company, arriving on Nov. 30, 1856. They knew what it was like to camp in severely cold weather. In succeeding years, the brothers crossed the ice on Utah Lake many times for wood. They left an account of one wood gathering trip that substantiates Clark's terse summary of frigid camping conditions.

One winter morning the Jones boys yoked their oxen, Duke and Baldy, hitched them to a wagon and left Provo for Utah Lake. For companionship they took along their hairy little terrier named Caesar.

The small party made good time crossing the 20-inch-thick ice, and when they arrived on the western shore they unhooked the oxen and climbed the mountain in search of wood.

The brothers cut a load of juniper, trimmed it, dragged it to their wagon and loaded the poles. After they completed this arduous work, they set up camp.

Albert and Samuel fashioned a mattress by covering the ground with the hay they were going to use to feed the oxen the next morning. Then they spread small juniper boughs over the hay and covered them with blankets and quilts. After supper, the siblings crawled into their cozy nest. A full moon illuminated the frosty beauty of the lake's shoreline as they fell asleep.

When the boys woke up, the moonlight reflecting off the snow was so bright it appeared to be morning. Neither young man had a watch, and they both assumed daylight was imminent. They arose and prepared for their trip home. The pair built a fire, folded their bedding, cleared the juniper boughs off the hay and fed their oxen.

The boys were preparing to have their own breakfast when they hit a solid snag. Their bread and water were frozen solid. They were forced to thaw their scanty provisions next to the fire before they could eat.

After finishing a belated breakfast, the young wood haulers drove their oxen onto the ice highway and started their load of wood homeward. The wagon's metal-rimmed wheels made a loud crunching noise as they rolled over the frozen snow covering the ice on the lake.

To keep his paws from freezing, little Caesar repeatedly lay on the hard snow and licked them. His owners took pity on the terrier and loaded Caesar into the wagon and covered him with bedclothes.

While moving their load of wood eastward across the ice, Albert and Samuel passed other teams coming from Provo on their way to get their own loads. The young men were surprised to see what time it was when they arrived home. They had left their wood camp so early it was only 9 a.m.

Lake crossing

Provo resident, Andrew Hunter Scott, considered hauling wood across Utah Lake to be such an important event that he noted it in his diary. In January 1858, he wrote, "The Sitizens Commenced Crossing the Lake for wood on the 7."

During January of the next year he penned, "The Bren [brethren] Carting wood across the Lake Utah ice 10 inches thick."

A Feb. 7, 1859, entry in the LDS Church Historian's Office Journal shows how common it was for people to get their wood from across the lake. The entry reads: "Several thousand loads of cedar wood have been hauled a cross the Utah Lake about 12 miles on the ice; most of the towns in Utah [Valley] have made use of the ice as a bridge to get their fire wood."

O.B. Huntington of Springville spent most of the winter of 1858-59 hauling firewood across Utah Lake.

The lake did not completely freeze over during some mild winters, and people could not cross. Those were uncomfortable winters for many families.

According to George A. Smith, the lake remained open during 1862. In a letter to George Q. Cannon, Smith wrote, "The people of Provo have been suffering for want of wood, from the fact of the Utah Lake not having been frozen over, thus preventing the people from crossing it to the cedar hills for wood." People of most other Utah Valley communities undoubtedly suffered the same problem.

Planning ahead

Some men harvested their firewood during warm weather and waited for the lake to freeze before they transported it to their homes. Victor Sandgren of Pleasant Grove preferred to burn maple logs which he secured from the scrub maple growing on the mountains on the west side of the lake. He cut and stacked the maple near the shore of the lake during the fall. After the water froze in the winter, Sandgren drove his sleigh across the ice and hauled the wood home.

Mary Huggard Adams's family drove their cattle to a ranch near Pelican Point each summer and returned to American Fork for the winter. All summer long, the family collected firewood for winter use. As soon as the lake froze, they transported their wood to American Fork over the ice.

The Utes apparently offered little resistance to the woodcutters, although the Indians did occasionally express their disapproval of the practice. James Robertson and two other men crossed the lake for their wood. On the way back, a group of Indians stopped them and said, "You take the trees from off the graves of our dead, we fight."

Robertson hoped to avoid a skirmish. He apologized and said the settlers did not mean to molest any graves. He told the Utes that if they came to his home he would give them grain, hay and other provisions as payment for the damage the settlers had done. The Indians seemed satisfied and left. Whether Robertson ever made good on his offer is unknown.

Charcoal enterprises

For several years during the 1850s, blacksmiths found it difficult to get charcoal to fire their forges, and potters also needed charcoal for their kilns.

Some enterprising Utah Valley men capitalized on this market. James and Henry Bush from Pleasant Grove were among the charcoal burners. They crossed the lake on the ice, cut wood and burned it in an enclosed pit, limiting the amount of oxygen to reach the fire. This process produced the charcoal that they hauled back to Pleasant Grove.

The brothers worked at this trade for several years. Henry claimed to have crossed the ice on Utah Lake 20 times.

Springville residents Luke Gallup, William M. Bromley and Richard Westwood also tried their hand at charcoal burning. They spent two weeks camped on the west side of the lake.

Gallup described it in his diary: "We went nearly West course & found our camp place 2 1/2 miles up into cedars. From 6 to 8 loads of cedar wood leaves the grove where we were daily. We cut wood & made one pit & burnt it."

For some, wood hauling provided a much-needed economic boost. Joseph Abraham Evans earned a wintertime living by cutting and selling posts during the depression that struck the nation the last decade of the 19th century. Evans got married in 1896, and he and his wife made their home on the Provo Bench. He farmed during the summer, but it was difficult to make ends meet that winter. During the cold season, Evans drove his team and wagon over the ice to the west side of Utah Lake.

He camped in a tent while he cut juniper. The part-time woodsman was so poor he could not afford overshoes, so he wrapped his feet in burlap to keep them from freezing. He hauled the posts back over the ice and sold them for 10 cents each.

Far-seeing men like Thomas Bullock realized the juniper would not last forever. In 1860, he told members of the Deseret Agricultural and Manufacturing Society, "In a few years (wood) will be very difficult to obtain from the already almost inaccessible mountain sides." Bullock recommended planting locust and cottonwood trees in the valleys to provide a future source of fuel.

Coal monopoly

With the discovery of coal beds in Utah and the advent of the transcontinental railroad to haul the coal to market, Utah Valley's fuel woes should have been over. However, the money-grasping owners of the Union Pacific Railroad tried to secure a monopoly on the market for coal. Thanks to predatory business tactics, the shortage of fuel in Utah Valley continued for more than a decade.

In a July 1874 letter to Joseph F. Smith, George A. Smith complained that the Union Pacific tripled the freight charged on coal shipped from mines the railroad company did not own. Then it continued to sell its own coal at a lower price, hoping to drive the independent coal mines out of business so the Union Pacific would completely control the coal market.

The remedy for this monopoly seemed to be the construction of a Mormon owned railroad through Central Utah and the development of coal mines in that area. Local investors constructed the Utah Southern Railroad through Utah County, and the Utah & Pleasant Valley Railroad was built up Spanish Fork Canyon to the mines near Scofield and Winter Quarters.

The new railroads should have solved the fuel problem, but they didn't. In December 1879, the Salt Lake Daily Herald explained why: The big railroad companies stopped acting as common carriers of coal; they only shipped fuel from their own mines.

Also, the two small companies, Utah Southern and Utah & Pleasant Valley railroads, made an agreement stipulating that the Utah & Pleasant Valley would ship no coal to points north of Sandy, and the Utah Southern would deliver no coal south of that city.

The Utah & Pleasant Valley did not want to lose its lucrative Sandy market, so it shipped almost all of its coal to Salt Lake County.

The result of this agreement was that Salt Lake City and the immediate vicinity had plenty of coal, and Utah Valley went without. Brown mud froze solid on Provo's streets, white snow covered the mountains to the east and the fields to the west, and the residents of the city appeared blue from both cold and depression.

The Deseret News reported that the scarcity of coal in Utah Valley led to more than the normal amount of travel across the lake for wood. According to Provo's Territorial Enquirer, the ice covering the lake measured 12 to 18 inches thick on Jan. 6, 1880, and teams began crossing the lake for wood to help relieve the fuel shortage.

Multiple crossings

Henry Hamilton, one of these woodcutters, summarized one trip in his journal. He crossed the ice on Jan. 13 and found it covered with snow and, in places, water. He noted many tracks through the snow indicating that numerous people had crossed earlier.

Hamilton arrived on the west shore early enough to take some wood to the lake's edge a little after dark. That night he continued to cut and load wood until his wagon was full. Then he started home.

In the dark, Hamilton lost the track several times and got stuck in a snow drift. He broke a clevis pin on his wagon while pulling the vehicle out.

When he reached the middle of the lake, the wind began to blow like a hurricane, and Hamilton's feet almost froze. He wrote in his journal, "I had my shoes off as my feet was very wet." The laconic lumberman arrived home a little after midnight.

Hamilton or his sons traveled over the lake for wood and back again five more times before the end of February.

A new agreement between the coal companies finally ended the fuel shortage and travel to the west side of the lake returned to normal.

Trips across the ice for wood continued into the 20th century. As late as 1915, Bishop John Johnson of Lakeview crossed the ice for fence poles.

The practice of crossing the lake for wood gradually decreased and finally ended when the ascendancy of the automobile and better roads made it easier and safer to travel to the other side of the lake by land.

By that time, trees from Lake Mountain had provided many grateful inhabitants of Utah Valley with fence posts and firewood, and its juniper groves had nearly vanished.

D. Robert Carter is a historian from Springville. He can be reached at 489-8256.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page B2.