It was a much earlier Christmas Eve than this when Thomas Dobson had one of his many great adventures as a law officer in Salt Lake City. It was a Christmas Eve in the late 1880s and Dobson, pounding his beat as the city's official night watchman, noticed two men breaking into the safe in Madam Button's Millinery Shop.
He cut through the saloon next door, where he found two of the city's finest, whom he sent to guard the front door of the millinery shop while he quietly slipped through the shop's back door.Confronting the two thieves, he shouted "Throw up your hands, boys," and kept them covered while the policemen made the arrest.
Dobson's feet had a talent, it seems, for carrying him into such escapades. Ironically, he had almost lost those feet in 1856, when he plodded barefoot in the snow behind a handcart in the Martin pioneer company. He was 19 when he and his mother and a brother and sister set out with the company to join the body of pioneers gathering in Salt Lake Valley.
When his shoes wore out, young Thomas continued behind the handcart in his bare feet. When relief supplies reached the company from Salt Lake City, there were no shoes that would fit his frostbitten feet, so he struggled on without any. Along the Sweetwater River, the group met Eph Hanks, a frontiersman who looked at Thomas' feet and vowed that the next pair of shoes that happened along would be his.
But when the Martin Company, decimated by the early snows and the difficult terrain, pulled into Fort Bridger, none of the available shoes would slip over his swollen and battered toes. It looked as if he would lose the digits, if not both feet. Hanks wrapped his feet in cotton and suggested what would have seemed an unlikely cure: If Dobson would stand up and sing the handcart song, his toes would be saved, the frontiersman told Dobson.
In a reunion of the handcart pioneers in 1907, Dobson recounted what happened next: During the night, he awoke to the sound of fiddle music. The trail-weary Saints were dancing to keep from freezing and to brighten their sagging spirits."I hobbled out to the fire and stood there listening to the music," he recalled. One of the brethren invited him to "get up there and give us a jig."
"Now, I come from Lancashire (England), and maybe you know what that place is for dancing. I'd known how to clog dance ever since I could remember, and when that man told me to dance, I got out there and danced as I never had before. That was the last of my lame feet," he told the gathering of pioneers.
Dobson's adventures didn't end with his safe arrival in Salt Lake Valley. Beginning in 1860, he first drove a six-mule team carrying supplies to mail express and stage stations. Then when a Pony Express rider became ill, he took over the man's route between Ruby Valley and Deep Creek. He once carried the mail for 237 miles without any significant break, including one 60-mile stretch on one horse.
During the summer of 1860, American Indians were harassing the pony riders, according to an account by Addie Quigley Williams. She recorded that a confrontation between soldiers and Indians near Egan Canyon had stirred up rancor. Dobson and another rider, James Cumbo, just happened to be the next white men passing through the area. The Indians pursued them, firing arrows, for 20 miles. Only the arrival of dusk saved the riders. The men later reported the arrows came so close they could feel the breeze they created.
Dobson served as captain of Company 4 in the Utah Militia but never received an official commission because of the actions of the acting governor of the territory, a non-Mormon. During the Indian uprisings in Sanpete County, he led his company into the area and succeeded in heading off several bands of raiding Indians.
Dobson's encounters with Indians continued when he was transferred to the stage line on the road between Salt Lake City and Pacific Springs, near South Pass, Wyo. Then he undertook a job driving a mule team back and forth to Los Angeles, a perilous route that tried the best of drivers. One trip convinced him it was no way to make a living. In 1879, the Salt Lake Herald praised him for his bravery and devotion to duty. He earned the sobriquet "Mormon Messenger" and a reputation for being the best in the business.
His feet, however, were due to take another beating. As Salt Lake's night watchman, he walked an estimated 21,353 miles in his repeated circuits of the area between Main and Commercial Streets and along 100 South over more than 30 years.
One night, he witnessed an altercation in a saloon between "Dutch John" and a man named Wiggin. Wiggin left the saloon just as Dobson passed by on his accustomed rounds, and they walked together until they caught up with the drunk Dutch John sitting on a carriage stoop. Wiggin asked the officer to wait a minute, then took a gun and shot Dutch John through the heart. Dobson made an immediate arrest.
On another occasion, he came upon three hobos robbing a man in the alley between Main and Commercial. When he ran to help the victim, there was a scuffle and the brigands escaped. Yet again, he was walking the beat when a man called "Stop, thief!" When Dobson took out after the escaping man, he raised his pistol and fired it so near the officer's face that he had powder burns on his cheek. Persisting, Dobson grappled desperately with the man and they rolled into an open water main ditch under excavation. A patrolman who had heard the ruckus, including the pistol shot, hurried up and made the arrest.
Even politics could prove dangerous to the man on the beat. In a conversation with a Republican (Dobson being a Democrat,) the exchange became so heated that the night watchman sent for a police wagon to take the hapless Democrat into custody.
Dobson and his wife, Katherine Beatty, had no children. In 1881, a friend, Andrew Quigley, was dying of the effects of a wound he had received at the hands of Indians while proselyting in the Salmon Mission. He brought his daughter, Addie, to Dobson and asked him to care for her. Dobson also adopted a boy who was called Henry, and he was known as a devoted and caring father.
Dobson was on the committee for handcart reunions for four years in the early 1900s and was always welcomed for his wit, humor and energy - and for his dancing. On Aug. 20, 1894, a news account of the annual gathering at Saltair noted that he had danced "The Fisher's Hornpipe," the same dance he had performed on the tailgate of a wagon in 1856 in the cold and dark of a Wyoming night.
Dobson's story is retold in an issue of the History Blazer, a publication of the Utah State Historical Society.