My Favorite Stories…Daniel Bonelli

In the history of Southern Utah and Southern Nevada,Daniel Bonelli should be listed among the greatest men who made history in the Southlands.  Bonelli,a Swiss emigrant,had joined the Mormon Church in Europe.  He crossed the plains to Utah and suffered the trials of those early Swiss pioneers.  In Brigham Young’s expansion south,Bonelli was an early recruit and leader among the Swiss pioneers to Santa Clara.  He was with Jacob Hamblin at Fort Clara and like Hamblin lost most of his worldly possessions in the great flood of 1862.

Trouble seemed to follow him,for at Beaver Dam,he was washed out again.  Next he went further south on the “Muddy River”(Overton,Nevada) where he started all over again.  

Daniel was an educated man,he spoke several languages,along with being a carpenter-cabinet maker.  It was during the late 1860s that the new State of Nevada put so much tax on the Mormon settler that many of them left the area.  Daniel Bonelli voted to stay on.  At this point in his life,Daniel,became slightly indifferent toward the Mormon Church,saying,“the Church left him.” He set up a small town called Rioville at the junction of the Virgin River and Colorado River.  With gold being found in Northern Arizona,Bonelli set up a successful ferry across the river,this to accommodate a host of new travelers.

It was Daniel that helped Major Powell on his second trip looking for his lost three men.  These were later found to have been killed by renegade Indians.  The aid to Powell was supposed to have been repaid by naming the Virgin Mountain the Bonelli Mountains.  But that didn’t happen.  Bonelli just got a small peak named after him,and he would often say,“those mountains should have had my name!”

Some say that Bonelli was a little eccentric and all agreed he hated getting old.  One day a young man walked up to him and asked,“Old Man,how far is it to the river crossing?” Bonelli looked him up and down and said,“three miles and if you call me old man again I’ll throw you all the way to that crossing.”

One of his most particular quirks was in his butter.  Salt was plentiful in that area in pioneer days but Daniel never used salt.  Mrs. Bonelli always made salt-free butter for him,saying “he owned more salt than any man in the southwest and he ought to use just a little.”

Being a good business operator,he often made trips to Pioche for supplies to sell,and it was 1904 that he suffered a stroke during some transactions in Pioche.  A few moths later he passed away.

Today there is little evidence that Daniel Bonelli ever lived in Santa Clara as a founding father,or that Southern was ever touched by this man,only a lone street in Overton bears his name.