Great Salt Lake tales of quicksand, unlucky equines and a phantom coyote

Is this pond of water along the sandbar to Fremont Island actually a pool of "quicksand" in the Great Salt Lake? Perhaps, as most of the rest of the sandbar has been dry in late summers recently.

IT has always seemed like quicksand in the Great Salt Lake was nothing more than a fanciful myth. However, according to the Ogden Standard-Examiner of May 28, 1939, two horses actually died in such “non-existent” quicksand.

“Horses die in quicksand of Great Salt Lake after driver missed stakes marking route. Ogdenite is haunted by experience as steeds drown” was the newspaper headline. Mike Boam of Ogden was driving a light rig, powered by horses, to travel to Fremont Island over an underwater sandbar. This route was often used in the 1930s to travel to the 2,943-acre Fremont.

                 In 1944, two horses pulled a wagon over the sandbar to Fremont Island.

           These men rode horses across the sandbar to Fremont Island in the 1940s.

Boam said that without warning his two horses “stepped into a patch of quicksand” and “several hours of labor failed to extricate the animals.” He had to wade about five miles through knee-deep brine along the “salty highway” to reach the mainland.

             Taylor Arave pauses at a pond of water along the sandbar to Fremont Island.

When he reached his home in Ogden he was exhausted, but could not sleep. “The look in the eyes of those horses when I left them wouldn’t let me rest,” he told the Standard-Examiner.

By the following day, both horses were dead, “victims of their own exertions and the brine they had drunk to quench their thirsts.”

Quicksand is simply sand inundated with water and where the liquid can’t escape, so while the animals didn’t sink out of sight, they were trapped in a sticky mess.

(I’ve walked that same sandbar to Fremont Island twice, when it was above water and mostly dry. Still, it wasn’t a straight path and at least once I had to curve around a pond of standing water.)

Also, in 2020, the Diesel Brothers, who used to own Fremont Island (before they sold the isle to a non-profit group) reported in a YouTube video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORFbOW027iM&t=167s&ab_channel=HeavyDSparks

 that some of their tractors and equipment had become stuck in “quicksand” along the Fremont Island sandbar. They were finally able to remove them, with great difficulty. "Peanut butter mud" was one of their descriptions of the briny, wet sand.

Sadly, there are other horror story for horses involving Fremont Island. When I first visited Fremont Island in June of 1982 by canoe, it was hard not to notice a large herd of ponies that were frightened by my presence and they galloped to the far west end of the Isle.

                            Looking across the south end of the sandbar to Fremont Island.

I had always assumed during later visits to the Island that the missing ponies must have been rounded up and removed. (There were a few other horses living on Fremont in 2006, when I was visited there, though.)

However, now I realize that while many of the ponies were removed, 40 of them were shot and killed on the Island.

                                  Several horses were grazing on Fremont Island in 2008.

An Associated Press story from March 22, 1988 states that the Idaho rancher who was leasing the Island at the time shot them, because the cost of removing all of them was prohibitive and they were over-grazing the Isle and he was going to put sheep there. He was able to capture and remove about 100 of the ponies by barge, but the remaining 40 were too hard to catch.

A private pilot flying over the Island had spotted the carcasses. The “welsh” ponies were placed on Fremont Island in the late 1950s, as part of a failed plan to make a recreational development on the Island. So, the animals soon became wild.

(The A.P. story can be found at: https://www.apnews.com/587130ee35e5a7bc42a1707ee80d605e)

-Horses and sheep weren’t the only animals to inhabit Fremont Island. For more than two weeks in the mid-1940s, a “Phantom” coyote escaped extinction from hunters.

The coyote, who was believed to have hitchhiked to the Isle on a rare chunk of iceberg in the Great Salt Lake, had killed some 15 of the 800 sheep grazing there.

An army of dogs and 20 armed men failed to kill the coyote during multiple attempts.

“Phantom of Isle still eludes dogs” and “Phantom Coyote has hunters marooned in Lake” were two headlines in the Standard-Examiner, from March 26 and March 29 of 1944, respectively.

High winds not only caused dogs to lose scent of the coyote, but they prevented the hunters from leaving Fremont.

“Hunters again foiled in Phantom Coyote chase; New expedition scheduled” was a March 31, 1944 Standard-Examiner headline. Hunters joked about needing to use a silver bullet to stop the animal, as numerous regular bullets had proven ineffective.

Finally, on the 15^th day of the hunt, “Island Coyote killed in lake waters” was the headline on April 4 in the Salt Lake Tribune. A bullet had finally wounded the coyote and so it jumped in the lake and tried to swim away. A speedboat caught up to him and he was hauled aboard and killed.

Four other coyotes had been speedily killed on Fremont Island in 1942 after they had killed numerous sheep, but none were as elusive as the phantom.

-The most famous part of Fremont Island is the historic cross that Kit Carson carved on the north end on Sept. 9, 1943.

Only about six inches long, this Christian relic was left during the first government survey of the Great Salt Lake and Island. Writings of the exploration prove Carson made the cross, though uncertainty about its origin swirled into the early 1940s.

“New speculation arises about Island cross” was a Nov. 2, 1943 headline in the Standard-Examiner. This story questioned the cross’s origin and speculated that a bored sheepherder in the 1850s had created it.

However, soon after it was universally accepted that Carson was indeed the sure author of the cross.

Note: Fremont Island is now owned by the State of Utah, after more than 150 years of various private owners.

From a ‘Lakemobile’ to a stroll to Fremont Island

  The "lakemobile" that Charles Stoddard used to cross the GSL to Fremont Island in.

                

                                            Fremont Island with a dry eastern bay  

By Lynn Arave

LIKE its larger cousin, Antelope Island to the north, 
Fremont Island isn’t always truly an isle at all.

A huge natural sandbar, during low lake levels, can offer dry land access to the somewhat mysterious, privately-owned “island.”

Growing up in Hooper, directly east of Fremont Island, I had heard tales of a man from West Point who years earlier – when the Great Salt Lake was at very low levels – used to drive a special truck all the way to the Island over only six or so inches of water.

                     The Fremont Island Sandbar, far left, as seen from Fremont Island.

Later, I found out his name was Charles Stoddard. He leased Fremont Island in 1932 and began ranching sheep there.

However, not wanting to rely completely on boat travel, Stoddard put caterpillar-like chains on the rear wheels of a Model “A” Ford Truck and created what others called a “Lakemobile” to access Fremont Island for several decades.

This natural sandbar, that Stoddard first discovered, was large, but not straight. So, during the low lake levels of the early 1930s, he put upright railroad ties along the shallowest part of the sandbar, from west of Syracuse – some 10 miles -- to Fremont Island, to mark its course. Then as the lake level rose, he had what David E. Miller in “The Desert Magazine” of May of 1949 referred to a “Salt Lake Trail on the Desert” to follow.

               The "Lakemobile" arrives on Fremont Island for the first time in 1934.


So, he basically drove a truck in the middle of the Great Salt Lake!

  The Fremont Island sandbar,from Fremont, as it snakes to the Antelope Island Causeway.

His only major problem was an ice floe that struck his truck in March of 1942. Although the lake’s briny waters do not freeze easily, the incoming fresh river water can and thus a small iceberg hit his truck and knocked it on its side.

  Charles Stoddard fixing the Wenner graves on Fremont Island. --Photo courtesy of Stoddard Family. He used rock from the old Wenner home to create part of the rock memorial.

Stoddard managed to upright the truck and get the ice away, but the Lakemobile ended up in a bog and wasn’t freed until more than eight months later -- the following November. Even then, he had to replace the truck’s salty motor oil and spark plugs and use kerosene to loosen the cylinders. Then the old truck started up and moved again.

                   Charles Stoddard's boat pulled by horses to reach Fremont Island in 1947.

Stoddard was also known to use a small boat, mounted on a two-wheeled trailer, and pulled by a team of horses to access the Island. He even told Miller that some youths once rode bicycles to the Island, while riders on horseback and even a touring car had successfully made the trip too.

                  Sheep travel the sandbar to Fremont Island in the 1940s.

By the early 1940s, the sandbar was briefly, but almost completely above water late one summer season. So, instead of having to boat sheep to and from the Island, Stoddard was able to herd them on mostly dry ground. Only the south end of the sandbar was then under water, just a few inches deep.

By 1948, the GSL had risen two feet in seven years and Stoddard had to use boat travel his remaining years of ranching.

  Horses used to traverse the sandbar to Fremont Island in 1943 to go on the Phantom Coyote hunt.

Twenty years later, in the late 1960s, as a teenager, I noticed two black posts and a gate sticking up in the water when traveling the newly built dirt road causeway to Antelope Island. I surmised that marked Stoddard’s “road.”

     The "black gate posts" circa 1980, as they marked the start of the sandbar to Fremont Island.

In the summer of 1979, a friend, Mich Oki, and I tried wading out to those black posts and found the water not only 4 feet deep there, but very muddy ground to try and wade through. The Great Salt Lake kept rising for another seven years.

 June 1982: Steve Hubbard and Larry Saunders as they prepare to explore Fremont Island after landing on its southeast tip after about a seven mile paddle in a canoe.


In June of 1982, two friends (Steve Hubbard and Larry Saunders) and I canoed about 14 miles roundtrip from Antelope Island to Fremont Island. We also had permission and visited the island at length. Wild ponies roamed the island back then, amid some exotic sheep.

(John C. Fremont and Kit Carson used an inflatable rubber boat when they visited the island in 1843. I also took a motor boat trip there in the late-1990s.)

The causeway soon washed out and was later rebuilt higher.
I tested the water around the gate post several more times over the years. They were completely under water in the mid-1980s, as the Great Salt Lake reached a historic high mark.

                                The ride to Fremont Island.


My parents too were fascinated by Fremont Island and they hired a boat and its captain in the early 1990s and we visited Fremont Island and waded to its shores for a brief visit, lacking permission to roam the isle.

       My family on Fremont, Mark, Norma, Gene and Wayne Arave, with boat off shore.

             Taylor Arave near the Fremont Sandbar in about 2002.

               Taylor Arave and what's left of the back gate posts in 2002.

 Enter the 21^st Century and the lake was receding again and now the posts were barely under water. But, again bogs near the causeway were hard to wade through.

          Mike Spencer, September 2004, resting after a 6-mile walk to Fremont Island.

Then, in the late summer of 2004, the lake was almost lower than it had ever been. Myself and two different friends, Mike Spencer and Ryan Layton, walked about 13 miles roundtrip on 100 percent dry ground to the edge of Fremont Island and back. We found a huge old anchor, antique bottles and even tires along our stroll of what used to be under up to 18 feet of briny water in the mid-1980s during the lake’s historic high mark.

              Taylor Arave in a dry bay around Fremont Island.

Again, in 2008, with permission to access the Island, I and my youngest son, Taylor, again walked the same dry sandbar route and roamed the isle. Then, we also ATV tracks and evidence of their visit to the island over the sandbar.

                       ATV tracks across the usually underwater GSL.

(As a sidelight: there is evidence too, that Kit Carson may not carved his cross on the island’s north end out of boredom, but rather as testimonial of his conversion to the Catholic Church.)

  Our bicycles, a few hundred yards off the Antelope Causeway. We rode them to the sandbar, as parking on the causeway after my first walk to Fremont is now prohibited

Thus, people have boated, floated, driven, bicycled and even ridden on horseback to Fremont over the years. There’s even a rugged airstrip on the island’s western side.

Fremont Island, though mostly barren, is a magical place that somehow always beckons you to return.

 Taylor pointing upward to show that the water was more than 12-feet deep here in the mid-1980s around Fremont Island in the bay off the island.

(-Originally published in the Ogden Standard-Examiner on Oct. 23-24, 2014.)

Note: Fremont Island is now owned by the State of Utah, after more than 150 years of various private owners.

-NOTE 2: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net