Retrospective: Cannibal! The Musical (Patreon)

An early scene in Cannibal! The Musical takes place in Bingham Canyon, Utah, where my great-grandfather Clyde Hibbard worked for about 40 years. He was a brakeman and then an engineer for the railroad in the Bingham Canyon copper mine. After my great-grandmother divorced him on grounds of abuse (the 40-page court document is harrowing), Clyde helped negotiate a contract between the Kennecott Copper Company and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen. He married one more time, and died of a heart attack at age 63, no doubt the result of living on the railroad all the live-long day.

Clyde Hibbard was the kind of man who populated the American West in the post-Gold Rush days, the kind of personally horrible, ordinary working man whom history forgets in the blink of an eye. He was raised by Mormons in Salt Lake Valley, and his parentage is something of a mystery. I'm fairly confident the woman who raised Clyde was his biological mother, but his birth date (for which I can't find a primary source) predates his parents' marriage by more than four-and-a-half years. Family legend says he was half-Paiute. That would make sense, but I haven't been able to verify it. A couple years ago, I asked the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah if they had any records of him. They didn't. The Utah Records Division was also unable to turn up a birth certificate for him.

Maybe he was a half-Paiute bastard whose Mormon father never let him forget it. Or maybe working a train for 40 hours in a copper mind fucked him enough to make him throttle his wife in the middle of the night and threaten to kill her. Maybe I'll find out someday. Some bits of family folklore are best left unresolved.

Unlike Alfred Packer, Clyde Hibbard definitely never turned to cannibalism. And unlike the Alferd Packer of Cannibal! The Musical, he certainly never went deep into Colorado Territory to find the one who got away (nor would she have been a horse). But like Trey Parker's Cannibal! The Musical, Clyde Hibbard's life story is more suggestive of other tales about Mormonism and the Old West than a concrete work in its own right. He missed the boat of American mythology. Maybe he should have lusted after a horse more. But let's be glad he never named a horse after his adulterous ex-fiancée.