Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 26, Number 3, 1958

HISTORICAL

QUARTERLY

July, 1958

UTAH'S PARKS AND SCENIC WONDERS

ABOUT THE COVER

Dead Horse Point From a mural painted by Lynn Fausett, courtesy Leon W. Harman.

HISTORICAL

QUARTERLY

A. R. Mortensen, Editor

UTAH

STATE

VOLUME

HISTORICAL

XXVI,

SOCIETY

NUMBER 3

July, 1958

Copyright 1958, Utah State Historical Society, 603 East South Temple, Salt Lake City, Utah

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS Typesetting and Composition DESERET NEWS PRESS Printing and Binding WHEELWRIGHT LITHOGRAPHING COMPANY Cover DEBOUZEK ENGRAVING COMPANY Colored Engravings RIDGES ENGRAVING COMPANY Black and White Engravings

CONTENTS The Land that God Forgot, BY JUANITA BROOKS

207

The Discovery of Glen Canyon, 1776, BY DAVID E. MILLER

221

Dead Horse Point in Rainbow Land, BY JOSEPHINE FABIAN

239

Dinosaur Country, BY G. E. AND B. R. UNTERMANN

247

Another Way West, BY JACK GOODMAN..

259

Humboldt's

269

Utah, 1811, BY C. GREGORY CRAMPTON

A New Look

ai

O^ Treasures, BY JACK GOODMAN

283

History and Scenery, BY A. R. MORTENSEN

297

Selected Readings on Utah's Historic and Scenic Wonders..—

299

ILLUSTRATIONS The Watchman and the Virgin River

206

The Falls of Sinawava

213

The Silent City, Bryce Canyon

217

Map of Lower Glen Canyon

220

Monument

222

Valley

Crossing of the Fathers

226

The Needles Area, Confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers

238

Rainbow Bridge, Goosenecks of the San fuan River

242

Moon Lake, Split

Mountain,

Relieving of Dinosaur Leg Bone, Petroglyphs

246

Reliefing Operations at Dinosaur Quarry

251

Replica of Diplodocus

253

Green Lake

254

Tony Grove Lake

258

Old funiper

262

"Camp Victory" and Rockfill in Great Salt Lake

264

Driving the Last Pile

265

"Carte Generale du Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne"

268

Map of Possible Commercial Route across Rockies, Alexander von Humboldt Old Stagecoach Inn

272 282

Lake Mary, Skiing at Alta

287

Old State House

290

Brigham Young Monument

296

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tThe Watchman and the Virgin River in an autumn setting. One of many gigantic fbuttes in Zion, the Watchman rises 2,600 feet above the river and with the Three Patriarchs guards the entrance to the Park.

Photo courtesy Paul R. Franke, National Parks Service.

THE

LAND

THAT

GOD F O R G O T

By Juanita Brool\s*

The desert of the southwest knows no artificial boundaries. Sliced through by the Colorado River and its tributaries, it sprawls and stretches to pale miniature mountains against distant horizons. Except for one brief period in the spring it is dun-colored, but given rain in January and February it bursts into life almost as if by magic. Suddenly every scraggy bush is standing in a bunch of grass which thins as it fans out into the open, but which in wet seasons becomes an almost solid carpet.

The first blossoms are the delicate annuals â&#x20AC;&#x201D; bluebells, buttercups, sugar flowers, and sego lilies. Then come the red cups of the slippery elm, the purple spikes of the sage, the pink sand-verbenas, and the flame-tipped Indian paintbrush. The vivid cacti and the tall stems of the yucca, heavy with waxen bells, appear last, like royalty making a dramatic entrance after all the common folk have assembled. It is as if Mother Nature would compensate for the brief blooming by giving it extra color and perfume.

But such loveliness cannot last. By June the grass is burned to a crisp, the little annual flowers are only blown bits of refuse, the dry yucca pods rattle upon their long dead stalks. Each plant which survives the summer heat has made its own adaptation â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the leaves of the creo* Mrs. Brooks is a prominent writer and authority on Utah and Western history.

She is a life-long resident of Utah's Dixie.

208

UTAH HISTORICAL

QUARTERLY

sote covered with gum, the yucca spines and cactus thorns all encased in heavy cellophane.

Before cars and good roads erased the distance, men learned to make their trips through the desert between September and May while the weather was moderate. Even then they must linger at the creeks and springs, follow the river beds as far as possible, and make long forced drives across country to water. If they must travel during the summer months, they adopted the habits of the desert animals, moving in the late afternoon through the night and taking shelter during the day in the shade of cliffs or sand caves or, if they were fortunate, under trees beside a stream.

The terrain is still a monotony to be endured, an area where the traveler may ride a whole day without seeing a living thing â&#x20AC;&#x201D; bird, beast, or reptile. Such is the nature of the desert. One who would know its secrets must take time to live intimately upon the ground, must listen and watch through many nights to become aware of even a small part of the activity of this strange land. For that reason some knowledge of the history of its past is necessary for a full appreciation of those who first came to live in it. Conquer it they could not, but they did exist in spite of it. For example, out of Las Vegas coming northeast on U.S. 91 the traveler passes a sign, "Mormon Mesa." What does that mean?

When was it named ?

In May, 1855, a company of wagons drawn by oxen or mules left Salt Lake City en route to the springs at Las Vegas, where the men had been called to act as missionaries to the Indians. They were joined by others on the way until at the last crossing of the Virgin River they numbered forty wagons. By this time it was June, and the heat was so intense that they left the stream in the evening and traveled part way up the slope toward the top of the mesa. Young George Washington Bean told how the next morning tJiey started over the last terrible mile, through sand from four to twelve inches deep on the hillside, which was almost perpendicular in places. Here they toiled the full day through, from sunrise to sunset. They used six yoke of oxen per wagon, plus twenty men pulling and tugging at a long rope in front, other men pushing from behind or carrying along large rocks with which to block the wheels at the stops. It was 7:00 P.M. before all were up, and in spite of the fact that their animals were jaded, they set out on a forced journey twenty miles to the Muddy Creek. About half of them would certainly have died of thirst if some of the more fortunate ones had not returned with water. Hence the name, "Mormon Mesa."

THE LAND THAT GOD FORGOT

209

Today in a comfortable car on a broad, hard-surfaced road, one finds no threat in this landscape, but only boredom with a terrain which stretches away as flat as a floor and as barren as the second day of Creation. The drop down into the valley of the Virgin River adds some variety, as does the village of Mesquite, Nevada. Soon the road leaves the river course and climbs toward a low mountain range. A scattered forest of Joshua trees covers the upper slope but stops abruptly at the foothills, and through a twisting gap the vista opens to vivid color. Vermilion bluffs jut out against a deep blue mountain backdrop; black lava-covered hills are pointed up by splotches of chalk-white clay. The combination is a fitting introduction to the scenic wonders beyond.

All the way the road has followed roughly the Old Spanish Trail, over which for ages the Indians had carried on their trade in horses and captive children. A favorite camping place was here on the Santa Clara Creek, where a small band of Shivwits still lives. In 1854 Brigham Young sent a group of missionaries to the Indians of this area. They made their headquarters about where a service station now stands, just at the entrance of the town of Santa Clara. Here they built a strong rock fort and planted some cotton seed as an experiment.

The next year die married men brought their families, and the single boys courted and persuaded their brides to join the community.

Such an interesting group! Jacob Hamblin, the oldest man, was thirtyfour years old, his wife Rachel, thirty-two; Dudley Leavitt was twentyfour and his two wives twenty-two and seventeen respectively; Zadoc K. Judd's wife was not yet twenty and the mother of two children. The five brides were still in their teens. Here, two days' travel from the nearest settlement, they supported each other through childbirth, fear of die Indians, and loneliness. For six years this rock fort was the last outpost on the desert.

In the fall of 1861 a company of twenty families, newly arrived from Switzerland, were sent here to raise grapes. It would be impossible to imagine a more complete, more total change in environment than they faced in the move from the lush Alpine slopes to this valley of blue sage set in salmon-colored sand. Everything was strange â&#x20AC;&#x201D; plant life, animal life, Indians, the whole landscape. But they had come to Zion with joy, and after dragging their handcarts from the Mississippi River to the Salt Lake Valley and making the trip south in relays from one community to another, they still "excited much curiosity through the country by their singing and good cheer."

Soon after they arrived, they surveyed the site for their town, num-

210

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

bered the lots, and placed corresponding numbers in a hat from which each man drew one to be his homesite. Since they could not plant until they could get water to the land, they began at once to dig a canal. All hands joined in the task, working a twelve-hour day for a credit of $2.00 on the books. By Christmas Eve it was done, at a cost of $1,030 in labor. Now they could celebrate!

But that very night the rain began, such a rain as none in this area had ever seen before. For forty days it continued intermittently, and on February 2, 1862, came the flood. Such a flood! It washed away the rock fort, the orchards of the first settlers, the burr flour mill, the molasses mill â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and the new ditch.

Now the old settlers moved away, leaving the Swiss to make another ditch before they could raise a crop. Those were hard, near-starvation years, those first two, but the people persisted and by their industry and frugality had within a decade become a prosperous community that boasted no poor in its midst. Though many of its young people have moved away, the town is still essentially Swiss, as evidenced by the fine homes and well-kept yards.

A week after the arrival of the Swiss company on the Santa Clara, a much larger group â&#x20AC;&#x201D; three hundred wagons â&#x20AC;&#x201D; pulled onto the site of St. George. This was known as the "Cotton Mission" or the "Dixie Mission," because of the hot climate. This accounts for the white "D" emblazoned on the black hill and the use of the word Dixie as part of the name of so many businesses. Today a stalk of cotton would be a source of wonder to the children of Utah's Dixie, but in 1861 with the Civil War cutting off the supply from the South, the people did plant and raise cotton for the state.

Following the orderly Mormon plan of colonization, this was a picked group with the right proportion of farmers, builders, carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and coopers to care for the erection of homes.

Musicians and schoolteachers also were called to set the cultural tone of the community.

Life here was rigorous. The heat, the alkaline soil, the recalcitrant river, the flies and mosquitoes combined so effectively that some families returned to the north after the first season. Those who remained started work on a red sandstone tabernacle before their own homes were finished. It stands trvlay with its clock and steeple, a building which looks as if it had beei ansplanted bodily from New England. That structure up to the s ire, the stonemasons started work at once on the impressive temple Jiich now, snow-white, dominates tL 'andscape. A

THE LAND THAT GOD FORGOT

211

third public building, the courthouse, was built while the temple was still in progress and stands foursquare in the pattern of courthouses from Boston to Vandalia. These three structures speak of the quality of their builders more eloquently than could volumes of words.

St. George today is a tourist center where modern motels and restaurants daily furnish accommodations for more than a thousand people, most of them en route to the National Parks. It is interesting to note that the very liabilities of the early settlers are the greatest assets of their descendants. This multi-colored land, with its barren, fantastically eroded hills, which then seemed such a curse, is now a blessing. Its very wildness, its untamed grandeur, provides "gold in them thar hills" of a kind that only increases with the intangibles which each visitor carries away.

From St. George through the village of Washington, also settled as a part of the cotton industry, you pass on through Hurricane Valley with its luscious fruits and berries and its ditch hanging high along the hillside, up and up a winding road to the top of the plateau. Stop here and look back at the scene behind you, just in case you don't come back this way.

Directly below you Hurricane covers the valley, a patch-work quilt in neat squares. To your right clumps of green mark the location of ranches or settlements, and beyond stretches the wasteland cut through by ridges and punctuated with upthrust masses of violent red rock standing on end. To the left rolling hills stretch out, one blanketed with some fifty acres of bright cerise sand, rippling and as clear of vegetation as beach sand, a miniature Sahara. Away and beyond this tucked-in corner stretches the desert.

Pioneer travelers, measuring these distances in terms of days and nights on the road, of hours plodding across a sandy stretch or up a grade to a summit, called the whole area "the land which God forgot." fi This view to them was not something to admire but the place where they must live; these colors spoke to them more of sterility than beauty.

You now stand almost midway between the two lanes of traffic through Utah â&#x20AC;&#x201D; U.S. 91, which you left some twenty miles back, and U.S. 89, which lies ahead. For nearly three hundred miles they run parallel, much of the way only forty miles apart, and joining them in a sort of magic circle are the scenic wonders of Zion, Bryce, and Cedar Breaks, all within a circumference of 150 miles. Tc instead of being the land that God forgot, it is the land that man r lembers and tells his friends r' Ji, reinforcing his telling with pictu i of unbelievable

212

UTAH HISTORICAL

QUARTERLY

quality. It is a land to return to again and again, for no one can ever wholly see it, so responsive and sensitive is it to the hours and the seasons.

Back on your way again, you ride across a level plateau, the skyline ahead a teasing lure to hurry you on. Close against your left is another flat elevation, the top held together with a tight band of hard rock from which the layers of softer earth burst away in flounces and billows and folds, horizontally striped, like permanent models for the abundant skirts of the Navajo maidens. On top of one elevation you may catch a glimpse of buildings and mechanisms connected with the government experiment known as "Project Smart." Here Dummy Sam is repeatedly being catapulted from a cockpit at a speed greater than that of sound — thrown dirough the air over the edge of the cliff to test the various effects on a jet pilot similarly ejected. No, visitors are not admitted except by special permission and when accompanied by authorized attendants.

Rockville and Springdale are little one-street rows of houses crowded between the Virgin River and the hills. Now for the first time you are close to the stream. Innocent looking, isn't it? Hardly large enough to be called a river, it ripples along, shallow and cheerful. You could take off your shoes and stockings and wade it almost anywhere without wetting your knees. Yet it was this same stream in flood that washed out the early village at Pocketville — houses, barns, and all — and then swung back in demoniac glee to scoop out the land upon which Duncan was going to establish another settlement. It has been said that the stream daily carries out of the canyon 180 carloads of ground rock.

After you reach the ranger station at Zion, make haste slowly. Pull up at the first viewpoint, stop, and get out for a general over-all impression of the place —the Three Patriarchs on the one side and the Watchman on the other guarding the entrance. Past this point die Indians would venture during the day, but would not let the evening catch them there. There is something so overwhelming about the place as the canyon narrows that they shrank away in awe, afraid of too close association with the spirits that whispered among the rocks.

Drive to the Temple of Sinawava, the end of the road for cars, and then get out and take time to enjoy this indescribable place. The general feeling is of mass — sheer cliffs that stretch up and up. How high ?

Why try to conceive the number of feet of several Empire State Buildings placed one on top of the other? The impression is of mass and height overwhelming, red walls in variegated shades, sheer, hard as

The Falls of Sinawava after a summer shower. Located just below the "narrows" of the Virgin River where it debouches into the upper end of Zion Canyon are the cathedral-like walls of the Temple of Sinawava. Photo courtesy Paul R. Franke, National Parks Service.

honed steel. There is vegetation, of course, but so little that it is dwarfed and lost on the blank upper reaches.

Close on the trails, aspens take the edge off the magnitude of what towers above and beyond the stretch of the imagination.

Follow to the trail's end at the edge of the Narrows, where the stream rushes out as from a huge pipe in an o p e n i n g , only t w e n t y feet wide in some places, between the 2,000 feet of sheer ledge, clean-cut and polished. It is said by those who have followed through this canyon, e n t e r i n g from above and c o m i n g d o w n with the streams d u r i n g low-water time, that die defile is so narrow and the slit of blue sky so far above that the stars can be seen in midday. H e r e you m a y see the w o r k of the stream more clearly, as it has cut its channel at the rate of an inch or two a year, and continues still to grind down the stone.

214

UTAH HISTORICAL

QUARTERLY

Linger in the Park as long as you can; your time will be well spent.

Go on the guided tours and listen to the stories of those who have background to help you see what you look at. Or, with one of the "selfguided tour" booklets to direct you, explore for yourself.

You might try to hike up Angel's Landing, for it is not too strenuous, leading as it does by winding trails up the back to bring you suddenly to the top and the edge of the cliff. Now you can get a better view of the still higher walls that surround you, and, even at this elevation, things take on a different aspect as you sense the distance both up and down.

Do not attempt to climb Lady Mountain on the west rim unless you are in condition, but if you are, tackle it with the assurance that the effort will be richly rewarded. There are no words coined to describe the magnificence of the view from here, the expanse of unexplored land that opens to the west, numberless peaks whose tops are on a level with the high plateau, divided by a labyrinth of abysmal chasms. Beyond them the view stretches out as though to the end of the earth. Is it thirteen mountain ranges that you can count? Some say more, some less, depending on the strength of their eyes and imaginations. But it is an unforgettable experience.

Perhaps you do not care to hike at all. It is almost as well, for you can sit quietly in the shade of one canyon wall and look at the other; you can close your eyes and feel the spirit of this place. Stop where you can contemplate the Great White Throne, the unconquered peak scaled by only one human being â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a seasoned mountain climber proud of his achievements in the Alps. He would win added fame by being the first to reach the top of this monolith! For one night his signal fire glowed on top of the crest, and that was all. Searching parties were sent out; airplanes flew over. It was futile, for the man had disappeared completely, and the mountain stood in silent disdain of their puny efforts.

If you are fortunate enough to witness the moon rise over the canyons, you will understand better why people can believe in elves and fairies, and why the Indians might shun the eerie shapes that the moonlight conjures up. Or you might happen to be there for one of the brief summer showers when each cliff has its own waterfall, a misty, varicolored veil. But at any hour of any ordinary day Zion Canyon will provide pictures for your memory album.

Leave the canyon by way of the Zion-Mount Carmel tunnel, one of the engineering feats of the world. You snake your way up the mountain side and enter the darkness. But stop at the windows to look back

THE LAND THAT GOD FORGOT

215

at the canyons and cliffs and to get perspective. It is almost like a summary at the end of an interesting chapter, tying the individual points together and showing them in relation to each other.

The scenery beyond Zion to the east is varied and interesting — the checkerboard mountain with its bare slope neatly marked into squares, the wooded hills, the open valleys, and the patches of cleared land. At Mount Carmel Junction the road joins U.S. 89.

Visitors who arrive at this junction from Phoenix and intermediate points have come up out of a desert very similar to that of California and Nevada. They have witnessed the same empty expanse, felt the same silence beating in waves against the eardrums, endured the same withering heat during the day, gloried in the evening sunset — a spectacle of color that reflects across the landscape — and experienced the same nightly benediction. There is one marked difference in Arizona country.

Navajo hogans, never in villages, dot the landscape. These rising swells and knobs seem almost like natural formations until one notices their blanketed doors, which always open to the east. The Navajo people have learned the insulating qualities of the good earth, so have built the hogan partly underground using a heavy layer of sod around and above to keep out the heat.

Past the Navajo land, across the Colorado River at Marble Canyon, skirting the Buckskin Mountain, the road drops to open country, where just a stone's throw from the Utah line is the village of Fredonia. Today, busy with lumber and with the backwash of Kanab's boom, it is much like any other rural Mormon town. Its background was unusual in that Zane Grey used it as the locale for some of his Westerns, for during the years when the Mormons were living polygamy proudly and defiantly, this town was a refuge for plural wives. Safe over the line in Arizona, they were secure against arrest by Utah officers, while still near enough to friends and neighbors at Kanab. So great was the annual crop of babies that some wag called it "the lambing ground."

Five miles farther on and just over the Utah line is Kanab, another town with a long and colorful past, though not more exciting than its present. In the early 1940's the Parry brothers helped some of the moving picture companies discover the scenery in this area — the cliffs, ledges, caves, trails, the meadows with streams and greenery beneath high mountain peaks — with the result that a number of pictures were filmed here, and nearly every summer finds one company or another headquartered here and working on location nearby.

But now the most important element in the economy of Kanab is

216

UTAH HISTORICAL

QUARTERLY

not moving pictures but the Glen Canyon Dam that is under construction seventy-five miles beyond on the Colorado River and the influx of people who come in to find work. The trailer house villages, die rude temporary camps, and the crowded schools combine to pose real problems for the city fathers.

Twenty miles north of Kanab is the Mount Carmel Junction, where those who have never seen Zion Canyon will want to detour. Others, en route to Bryce, will continue up U.S. 89 through Mount Carmel and Orderville, sheltered by trees and surrounded by lush farms and orchards. Of these two, Orderville has the more unique past in that it is the one place in the state where the attempt to live the communal "Order of Enoch" succeeded.

The idea grew out of earlier attempts to establish a Utopia in which there should be no rich and no poor, but all should live in equality and fraternity. In the beginning this village consisted of an enclosed square around the edge of which individual homes, or more accurately perhaps, sleeping apartments, were built, while the large building in the center was a composite of living-room, dining-room, meeting-house, and dance hall. Attached to it was the kitchen with its huge stone ovens and great kettles, while the dairy-room, the deepfreeze of the time, was outside the square.

Under the "Order" all ate at the same table; the men and boys old enough to work in the fields were served first, the women and children later. The work of the household was rotated, the girls taking turns at serving, washing dishes, caring for the milk, butter, and cheese, cleaning the bedrooms, spinning, weaving, sewing, and so on through the whole list of occupations. The men's assignments were more often for the year â&#x20AC;&#x201D; with each man responsible for some project. The blacksmith, the shoemaker, the baker, or the carpenter might retain his position for years with apprentices under him, while the farmers, the lumbermen, and others whose work was seasonal might rotate or share occupations.

Frequent discussion meetings kept everyone up to date and ironed out misunderstandings. Each worked according to his ability, and all shared equally in the profits of the enterprise. Annually when the books were balanced, debts were forgiven and everyone started anew.

The result was a very close-knit society, with all the girls dressed in dresses of identical material, though they might try their ingenuity in the trim or pattern, and the boys all in home-spun and manufactured jeans or suits, straw hats, and serviceable shoes from the hides of their own cattle. Oldsters remembering these days insist that they were happy

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PHOTO W A Y N E B. ALCORN, COURTESY GLEN T. BEAN, BRYCE NATIONAL PARK

The Silent City, Bryce Canyon. Taken from Inspiration Point, this flamboyantly colored scene is enjoyed by thousands in its summer glory, but relatively few are familiar with its winter solitude. and peaceful and that there was a spiritual and emotional unity among them not of this earth. Certain it is that they were dedicated to the idea, for while most of the other communities where similar "Orders" were established continued the experiment only past the second year, these good folk lived it in full fidelity for eleven years, and then formally dissolved only after they were counseled to do so by their leaders.

The ride through Long Valley is a delight, with the road just high enough along the hillside to miss the grassy bottomland and to give an excellent view of the mountain on the other side. The stream grows smaller as the road ascends until at last it is a mere trickle between pools or seeps from among the grass edges. Then suddenly the water is running in the other direction, for here on this divide the Virgin and the Sevier touch finger tips.

Through Asay town and Hatch the country opens toward the Sevier Valley, and soon after you pass the Bryce Canyon junction you get a hint of color in Red Canyon. But nothing can prepare you for the impact of Bryce. You are riding through mountain growth among pines and aspens at an elevation which seems to extend without break to a distant horizon. Then suddenly there you are! A horseshoe-shaped

218

UTAH HISTORICAL

QUARTERLY

bowl opens beneath you, and you find yourself looking down into an amphitheater covering fifty-five square miles, filled with pinnacles and towers and figures. It is almost too magnificent, too violent to grasp, for in addition to the enchanted chaos of form there is the play of color, shading from the frosted white top which crowns the higher peaks through yellow to coral and rose. Subdivide the colors in any way you choose — saffron, apricot, persimmon, watermelon — they are here. That is, at one time or another, in varying degrees of density they are here, for this is color changing.

Here is none of the classic simplicity of Zion. Here you are not an infinite small speck looking up at mass and height. Here you stand on the edge of a fairyland with gentle trails luring you to come down and explore. Descend even a few hundred yards and surprise yourself with the magnitude of these individual sculpturings — pinnacles in rows, in groups exchanging confidences, or standing aloof and disdainful of company. The Greeks would have peopled this area with a special kind of deity.

If you arrive at midday and find the colors pale and washed-out, do not be disappointed. Stay and watch them bloom in the light of the sinking sun, bloom and glow as with an inner illumination. Then as the shadows gather in the defiles and fill the narrow gulches, rising inch by inch along the base, see how the spires burn like flaming tips. Or in the morning watch them drop the blue veil from their shoulders to folds around their feet, to vanish as the sun limns the edge with a pencil line of pure gold.

As you stand at this elevation and look off to the east into the unknown land, you can quite clearly see white spires jutting out of the ground like pale asparagus tips rising above the plain. "The Stove Pipes" local folk call them, this formation for which even the most learned geologists have neither name nor explanation. If you love exploring, if you like to live daringly and on the edge of things — and if you have time — take the trip over the rim and down into this amazing land. But get directions and guides and carry along a good camera with color film or you can never make anyone understand what you found on "Kodachrome Flat."

Returning now to U.S. 89 you may want to go on north past Panguitch (Indian for big fish) and on into Salt Lake City. But if you want to complete the circle and return to U.S. 91, go back to the Long Valley junction and take the high road over the mountain, over wooded hills and past brush-filled valleys where fern and columbine thrive, through

THE LAND

T H A T GOD FORGOT

219

tall ponderosa pines skirting Navajo Lake, on up until you are literally on top of the world. A vista opens out to the south and west, and you are suddenly caught up in a sense of vastness and peace above and beyond the smog and clangor, away from the race with time and the demand for tranquilizers.

Pull off and view Cedar Breaks at the viewpoint called Brian Head, the highest point in the area. Here you see Bryce as it was aeons ago when the wind and water were just getting on with their work, for this is the same scene, only millions of years younger.

Back at Cedar City on U.S. 91 you fall again into the stream of life, but the memory of these natural beauties will be as a fresh breeze across your face, the whole experience something in the nature of a baptism.

Surely this is not the land which God forgot, but the one He has preserved inviolate to minister to the troubled heart of man.

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The map of lower Glen Canyon is by David E. Miller. On page 226 an aerial view looking southwest across the Colorado River at the site known as the "Crossing of the Fathers" is reproduced through the courtesy of W. C. Lee.

DISCOVERY

OF GLEN

CANYON,

1776

By David E. Miller*

Activities associated with the building of Glen Canyon Dam are focusing nation-wide attention on the whole canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona, one of the most spectacular and unique regions in America. Here is a veritable scenic wonderland, rich in historic background and resplendent with local color. High on the list of its attractions is the deep straight-walled canyon gorge where the dam is being built. Adequate observation points afford opportunity for visitors to observe the actual progress of the construction program. A good access road extends eastward from Kanab to the damsite, seventy-five miles distant. This highway will soon bridge the Colorado gorge immediately downstream from the dam and rejoin U.S. Highway 89 a dozen miles south of Navajo Bridge. Other important attractions in the * Dr. Miller was a member of an expedition, supported by a grant from the University of Utah Research Fund, which made a preliminary reconnaissance into the Glen Canyon area in 1956. In 1957 he was assigned to the history section of the Upper Colorado River Basin Archeological Salvage Project. He has conducted four more field trips for the purpose of checking numerous points along the Escalante trail, most of which he has covered either on foot or by jeep. Numerous people have aided with this field work, foremost among them being C. Gregory Crampton, professor of history at the University of Utah, who headed the 1956 reconnaissance. Others include: A. R. Mortensen, director of the Utah State Historical Society; Henry J. Webb and Kenneth E. Eble of the University of Utah English Department; W. H. Snell of Brigham Young University; Wendell E. Taylor of Salt Lake City; Fay Hamblin of Kanab, Utah, and Earl E. Olson, librarian, L.D.S. Church Historian's library. Numbered footnotes appear at the end of this article.

P H O T O COURTESY W . C . L E E

Monument Valley is in Navajo Reservation country. The awe-inspiring monoliths in this colorful land of isolation are scattered over a wide area which stretches across the Utah-Arizona line. area are: Paria Canyon, one of the most colorful spots in the West and the site of a Mormon ghost town; The Crossing of the Fathers, where the discoverers of Glen Canyon forded the Colorado in 1776; Hole-inthe-Rock, site of the most spectacular pioneer road-building project in the West; Rainbow Bridge, whose majestic sweeping arch is high enough to clear the dome of our National Capitol; Navajo Mountain and Monument Valley farther to the east; the famous Bryce and Zion National Parks to the north and west. Countless other canyons, buttes, and mesas, too numerous for identification here, contain natural bridges, arches, balancing rocks, extensive sand dunes, petrified wood, and desert flowers â&#x20AC;&#x201D; everything, in fact, which contributes to the solitude and charm of our southwest desert country. In addition to the natural splendor of the area, this is the home of the Navajo Indians, who have developed a unique and charming desert culture. Now that this region

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is being opened and made accessible, it is bound to become one of the most attractive sections of America.

During the late summer of 1776, shortly after the thirteen English colonies on the east coast of North America had declared their independence and George Washington was making a desperate and heroic attempt to hold the American position in New York against superior British forces, another epic of American history was being enacted in a wild, desolate, unexplored region of the Far West. During that season the Dominguez-Escalante expedition discovered the Glen Canyon of the Colorado River, examined portions of it rather carefully, and eventually cut steps down the solid rock wall of one of its tributaries in order to ford the mighty stream at a spot now known as the Crossing of the Fatiiers. The following is an account of the activities of that Spanish party in the Glen Canyon area.1 ORIGIN OF T H E DOMINGUEZ-ESCALANTE EXPEDITION For several years prior to 1776 the Spaniards had been pushing northward along the west coast of North America. Missions had been established at San Diego in 1769; Carmel, 1770; San Gabriel, 1771; San Luis Obispo, 1772; and the expansion was just getting started. San Francisco and San Juan Capistrano would be founded during the year of 1776, Santa Clara, 1777, with numerous new settlements in the following years.

A natural outgrowth of this Spanish expansion into California was the desirability of establishing a line of communication between the older settlements of New Mexico and the new ones on the Pacific. Three Franciscan fathers, Francisco Garces, Silvestre Velez de Escalante, and Francisco Antanasio Dominguez, had, all acting under similar instructions from their superiors, spent considerable time and energy on this project prior to the great exploration of 1776.

In 1775 Escalante was stationed at the Zuni villages where he was busily engaged in missionary work among the natives. During July of that year, under authorization from the governor of New Mexico, he led a small expedition to the Hopi villages for the purpose of investigating the feasibility of opening a route to Monterey by way of the Colorado River and the land of the Cosninas, now known as the Havasupais.

Although the Spaniards were given a cool reception by the Hopis, who had demonstrated no interest in the Christian God, Escalante had the good fortune of meeting a young Cosnina who happened at that time

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to be at the village of Walpi. The two men seem to have gained each other's confidence at once, and in the course of the conversation the priest was able to gather considerable information concerning the country and people to be found along the proposed route to California.

Armed with this new mass of information plus a rapidly growing enthusiasm for the project ahead, Escalante hurried back to make his recommendations for an expedition of reconnaissance.

Meanwhile Father Garces, operating out of San Xavier del Bac (near Tucson, Arizona), had been exploring the possibilities of opening a route from that mission to Santa Fe. During the spring of 1776 he pushed eastward as far as the Hopi villages.

While Escalante and Garces were busy conducting these preliminary reconnaissances in the west and attempting to gain favor with the Indians of the region, the third man of the trio was eagerly promoting the same project. Early in 1775 Father Dominguez was sent to inspect the Christian progress in New Mexico and report the condition of the missions there. He was further instructed to attempt to open a route to the California coast and soon began laying plans for the inauguration of that project. Since Dominguez was well acquainted with the activities of Escalante in the area, it was quite natural that he should have summoned the Zuni missionary to Santa Fe for consultation. The meeting of these two took place early in June, 1776, and culminated in the organization and launching of the now famous Dominguez-Escalante expedition, one of the greatest explorations in Western history.

Because the Spaniards had received cold treatment at the hands of the Hopis, who resisted Spanish expansion, and since the Apaches along the Gila River were known to be hostile toward the white man's advances, a direct route westward from Santa Fe seemed impracticable at that time. However, during the preceding decade numerous Spanish explorers and traders had pushed northward from New Mexico, and by 1776 the area comprising southwestern Colorado as far north as the junction of the Uncompahgre and Gunnison rivers was fairly well known.

It is very likely that the region north of the latter stream had likewise undergone considerable examination. As a result, leaders of the proposed expedition decided to follow a northern course as far as the country was known and eventually swing to the west in a circuitous route to Monterey. Although the primary purpose of the undertaking was that of a line of communication, its leaders also hoped to bring Christianity to the natives who would be encountered en route and ultimately establish missions among them.

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COMPANY PERSONNEL AND GENERAL ROUTE Departure from Santa Fe had been set for July 4, 1776, but unforeseen events necessitated a delay of almost a month, and the expedition finally set out on July 29. Father Dominguez was official head of the enterprise, but since Escalante wrote a superb daily record of the company's progress, his name is more often associated with the expedition than that of his superior officer.2 Indeed, the trek is usually referred to as the Escalante expedition. A third major member of the company was Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, a retired army captain then living at Santa Fe. As cartographer of the expedition, Miera prepared some outstanding maps of the area traversed and also presented the King of Spain with a glowing written account of the reconnaissance.3 In addition to the three men listed above, the following seven names appear on the official list of the expedition's personnel: Don Juan Pedro Cisneros, alcalde mayor of the pueblo of Zufii; Don Joaquin Lain, citizen of Zuiii; Lorenzo Olivares, El Paso; Andres Munis, interpreter of the Yutas language, and his brother Lucrecio; Juan de Aguilar; Simon Lucero, servant of Cisneros.4 Although the expedition consisted of only ten persons at the beginning of the trek, two "genizaros" (friendly Indians of mixed blood) joined the company August 14 on the Dolores River near Cahone, Colorado. Escalante usually refers to these men as Felipe and Juan Domingo.

Near the present town of Austin, Colorado, the company encountered and hired as guide a Laguna Indian to whom the padres gave the name of Silvestre. This man accompanied the party as far as Utah Lake, performing valuable service. A few days later, September 2, along the route between the Gunnison and Colorado rivers, a second Laguna Indian was added to the company. He was given the name of Joaquin and accompanied the explorers all the way back to Santa Fe. At Utah Lake a third Laguna Indian, given the name of Jose Maria by the priests, joined the company as guide, but he deserted on October 5 as the expedition was passing through the west side of Pavant Valley, south of Delta, Utah. Other Indians traveled briefly with the company from time to time but not long enough to give them official status as part of it. An examination of these names and dates will show that during most of the trek the expedition consisted of from twelve to fourteen persons. Plenty of horses and mules for riding and packing were supplied; how many is not known. A small herd of cattle was driven along to help supply food on the early part of the trek.

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The expedition headed northwestward from Santa Fe, through northern New Mexico and western Colorado, on a meandering course that eventually took them to the Green River in northeastern Utah.

They forded this stream on September 16 just south of the present entrance to Dinosaur National Monument, immediately north of Jensen, Utah.0 Their march then took the party westward along the Duchesne River to the rim of the Great Basin where Strawberry Reservoir is located today, just south of U.S. 40. From that point the company made its way over the divide and down Spanish Fork Canyon to Utah Lake, which the Spaniards named Lake Timpanogos for the friendly Indians of the area. After a few days in the Utah Lake vicinity, the expedition turned to the south, struck Sevier River a short distance southwest of Nephi, Utah, and followed it most of the way to Sevier Lake. From the Pavant Valley the route again turned to the south.

On October 8, in the vicinity of present-day Milford, Utah, the padres determined that since the season was already so far advanced and there seemed to be no trail to the west, it would be well-nigh impossible to continue toward the Pacific Coast. They decided to return to Santa Fe. As a result, the party continued southward through Utah, and made a long difficult circuit into northern Arizona before eventually arriving, on October 26, at the mouth of the Paria River on the Colorado. Camp was pitched just west of the present buildings of Lee's Ferry and named San Benito Salsipuedes.

EXPERIENCES AT LEE'S FERRY Expedition leaders realized that the major obstacle blocking their route back to Santa Fe was the mighty Colorado which must be crossed somewhere. Natives encountered along the way told vague stories of a satisfactory shallow ford which must be located before the company could proceed very far. Hunting for this place where the river could be successfully crossed developed into a desperate search which led to the discovery and exploration of the lower portion of Glen Canyon.

The Spaniards' first attempt at a crossing was made at the present site of Lee's Ferry, some six miles upstream from the present Navajo Bridge at Marble Canyon and right at the lower end of Glen Canyon.

Here expedition leaders sent two expert swimmers6 into the stream in an endeavor to cross and explore southward for the purpose of determining whether or not a suitable route out of the river gorge could be found at that point. There would be no advantage in gaining the south bank

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only to be hemmed in by impassable terrain. Carrying their clothes in bundles on their heads, the two men plunged into the current. Finding it much swifter and wider than it had appeared from the bank, they felt lucky to be able to reach the south side alive, having lost their clothing in the turbulent river water. Naked and exhausted, the men had no stomach for an exploration southward, especially without shoes. After a brief rest they again struck into the swirling waters and managed to return to the north shore in safety. Obviously, this was not the easy shallow ford described by the Indians.

The next day (October 27) Don Juan Pedro Cisneros was dispatched on an exploration of the Paria River in an attempt to find a way out of the Glen Canyon gorge. "He traveled all day and part of the night without finding a way out. He saw an acclivity very near here by which it would be possible to cross the mesa but it appeared to him to be very difficult. Others went to reconnoiter in different directions but found only insuperable obstacles in the way of reaching the ford without going back a long distance." 7 With no other apparent avenue of escape from their predicament, the padres decided to make another desperate attempt to cross the Colorado, and devoted the major part of October 28 to this undertaking.

Since swimming or fording seemed out of the question, expedition personnel constructed a raft of driftwood logs found along the river bank in an attempt to float across. Father Escalante, assisted by two or three others, led this second assault on the mighty Colorado. However, a short distance from shore the twelve-foot-long poles used to propel the raft failed to touch bottom, and the craft drifted helplessly. Adverse winds, eddies, and whirlpools prevented the party from reaching midstream, and after three unsuccessful attempts the enterprise was abandoned. Although the padres were extremely disappointed at their apparent failure, they were probably very fortunate not to have been able to propel their raft into the middle of the stream. Had tiiey reached the center of the channel, the swift current undoubtedly would have swept the party rapidly downstream into Marble Canyon and almost certain destruction.8 Completely convinced that there was no possibility of crossing the Colorado at that point and that this was certainly not the ford described by the Indians, the leaders now dispatched Andres and Lucrecio Munis on a second reconnaissance of the Paria with instructions to find a way out of the canyon gorge and explore upstream along the Colorado until they found a satisfactory ford.

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In the meantime, not knowing how long the wait would be, the padres ordered a horse slaughtered to replenish the exhausted food supply. This was the second horse to become part of the rations, the first having been killed on October 23. The fact that the company had to resort to slaughtering their horses in order to sustain life is a good indication of the deplorable situation in which they found themselves.

At one o'clock on November 1 the two explorers returned with the report that they had not only found a pass by which the company could climb out of the Paria but also had located the long sought ford of the Colorado. The pass seemed to be the one Cisneros had sighted on October 27, and since it was very steep and difficult, the padres decided to march up the Paria one league to its base and camp for the night in order to be able to make the ascent early the next morning. Escalante notes in his journal that the night was very cold, resulting in much suffering among the personnel. This was a sort of forecast of cold stormy weather that could be expected at that season of the year.

FROM LEE'S FERRY TO T H E CROSSING OF T H E FATHERS After this cold uncomfortable night, Escalante recorded the following: November 2. We set out from Rio de Santa Teresa [Paria River] and climbed the acclivity, which we called Cuesta de las Animas and which must be a half a league long. We spent more than three hours in climbing it because at the beginning it is very rugged and sandy and afterward has very difficult stretches and extremely perilous ledges of rock, and finally it becomes impassable. Having finished the ascent toward the east, we descended the other side through rocky gorges with extreme difficulty. Swinging north, and having gone a league, we turned northeast for half a league through a stretch of red sand which was very troublesome for the animals. We ascended a little elevation, and having traveled two and a half leagues also to the northeast, we descended to an arroyo which in places had running water which although saline was fit to drink. There was pasturage also, so we camped here, naming the place San Diego. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Today four and a half leagues.

Today we camped . . . near a multi. ide of narrow valleys, little mesas and peaks of red earth which at first sight look like the ruins of a fortress.9

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This day's march had brought the company to Wahweap Creek where camp was pitched on the relatively smooth bottomlands just north of the Utah-Arizona boundary, slightly upstream from the upper end of the narrows whose precipitous walls make it impossible to cross Wahweap Canyon below that point. In clear view to the northeast and east of this spot are some outstanding rock formations, one of which bears the name of "Castle Rock," doubtless the same formations which reminded Escalante of fortress ruins.

From the east bank of the Wahweap the expedition struck a southeasterly course toward the Colorado. This time they reached the sheer north rim of the river gorge opposite the mouth of Navajo Creek, which comes into the Colorado from the southeast. One glance convinced Escalante that the two scouts "had neither found the ford, nor in so many days even made the necessary reconnaissance of such a short stretch of country, because they spent the time seeking some of the Indians who live hereabouts, and accomplished nothing." lu Here the precipitous walls of Glen Canyon were found to be almost impassable for man or beast, but Juan Domingo and Lucrecio Munis were sent across the river in search of a possible way out via Navajo Creek Canyon â&#x20AC;&#x201D; should the Colorado prove fordable. Lucrecio was equipped with a horse but no saddle or other gear and virtually no clothing, having stripped off all but his shirt in order to lighten the load.

H e did carry fire-making materials so that he could send back smoke signals in case an exit via Navajo Creek should be found. Escalante noted that the horse had a difficult time crossing the river at thut point, having to swim "for a long stretch and where it faltered the water reached almost to its shoulders."

In the meantime the remainder of the company endured an uncomfortable dry camp on the canyon rim, "not being able to water the animals although the river was so close by. W e named the campsite El Vado de los Cosninas, or San Carlos." T h e following day Escalante, discouraged but far from defeated, made the following journal entry: November 4. Day broke without our getting news of the two we sent yesterday to make the reconnaissance. W e had used up the flesh of the second horse, and today we had not taken any nourishment whatsoever, so we broke our fast with toasted leaves of small cactus plants and a sauce made of a berry 11 they brought from the banks of the river. This berry is by itself very pleasant to taste, but crushed and boiled in water as we ate it today it is very insipid. Since it was already

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late, and the two emissaries had not appeared, we ordered that an attempt should be made to get the animals down to the river, and that on its banks another horse should be killed.

With great difficulty they got the animals down, some of them being injured because, losing their footing on the rocks, they rolled down long distances. Shortly before nightfall the genizaro, Juan Domingo, returned, declaring that he had not found an exit, and that the other emissary, leaving his horse in the middle of the [Navajo Creek] canyon, had followed some fresh Indian tracks.12 To anyone who has visited this portion of Glen Canyon, it seems almost impossible that the Spanish expedition was able to maneuver their horses from the canyon rim down to the river water opposite the mouth of Navajo Creek. Yet they did it without loss or serious accident.

It likewise seems incredible that Lucrecio should have failed in his attempt to negotiate that canyon on horseback, especially at the low water season. Hikers cover that stretch with relative ease nowadays.

Early the following morning the search for the ford was pursued; the only feasible thing to do was to continue upstream in search of it.

After a league and a half of very difficult traveling almost due north, the expedition found itself on the west bank of Warm Creek which flows into the Colorado just north of the Utah-Arizona boundary.

Warm Creek cuts through a narrow, winding, steep-walled gorge in its lower reaches; it is not surprising that the Spanish party experienced some hardship in getting across it. However, they located the only practical access route into it from the west by way of a long sandy slope, over which the party managed to approach the canyon rim. Already used to mastering steep walls, they soon worked their way down to the floor of this new gorge, almost a mile above its confluence with the Colorado.

In this canyon "there was a great deal of copperas. In it we found a little-used trail, followed it, and by it left the canyon, passing a small bench of white rock, difficult but capable of being made passable." 13 Isolated outcroppings of green and white rock add interesting color contrast to the reds, browns, and grays of that region today. Escalante's mention of such details lends considerable assistance to historians attempting to retrace his route.

Once across Warm Creek Canyon the expedition found relatively flat terrain and soon arrived at the southwest base of a high mesa where limited water and sufficient pasturage were found. This camp was

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located in one of the upper branches of Cottonwood Wash (a tributary of Warm Creek) and immediately west of a huge mesa.14 A small seepage at that site still supports cottonwood trees and supplies limited water for animals. Escalante named the campsite Santa Francisca Romana.

During the night a heavy rainstorm drenched the camp and did not cease until "several hours" after daybreak, November 6.

As soon as the rain stopped, the party continued its march, skirting the south end of Romana Mesa and then proceeding in a northeasterly direction. After traveling three leagues they were forced to stop "for a long time by a heavy storm and a torrent of rain and large hail, with horrible thunder and lightning. We chanted the Litany of the Virgin in order that She might ask some relief for us and God was pleased that the storm should cease." 15 Since they were now in the drainage of Gunsight Canyon, it seems safe to assume that the cloudburst had sent a flash flood booming down that wash, forcing the expedition to halt while the water subsided. As soon as conditions permitted (although the rain did not cease) travel was resumed. The company now skirted the south end of Gunsight Butte, continued a short distance to the east, and, finding the way "blocked by some boulders," camped for the night.16 This camp, called San Vicente Ferrer, was located on the soutli side of Navajo Canyon (locally known as Padre Creek) less than a half-mile straight east from the south tip of Gunsight Butte and about the same distance from the Colorado River rim.17 Anxious to learn if there was a possibility of crossing the river at this point, the fathers sent Cisneros to make a reconnaissance. He soon: .. . returned with the report that he had seen that here the river was very wide, and judging from the current it did not appear to him to be deep, but that we would be able to reach it only through a nearby canyon.18 We sent two other persons to examine the canyon and ford the river, and they returned saying that it was very difficult. But we did not give much credence to their report and decided to examine everything ourselves next day in company with Don Juan Pedro Cisneros.

Before nightfall the genizaro arrived with Lucrecio.19 T H E CROSSING OF T H E FATHERS Early on November 7 Escalante, Dominguez, Cisneros, Felipe, and Juan Domingo set out to examine the canyon and ford. They found access to Navajo Canyon (Padre Creek) very steep and difficult, necessi-

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tating the cutting of steps "with axes for a distance of three varas or a little less" down its south slope in order that the horses might obtain secure footing.20 In this way the animals made the descent safely, although without packs. Once in the bottom of the Navajo, an easy walk of approximately a quarter of a mile brought the men to the river proper.21 From this point they turned downstream (to the south) and traveled "about two musket shots sometimes in the water, sometimes on the bank, until we reached the widest part of its current where the ford appeared to be. One of the men waded in and found it good, not having to swim at any place."22 Actually, they had not gone more than a hundred yards downstream from the mouth of Navajo Canyon before arriving at a fine sandbar several yards wide, which extends some three hundred yards beneath the sheer cliffs of the Colorado's west wall, and were thus enabled to examine the area before attempting to cross. After selecting the most likely spot, one of the men waded in, found the river bed solid, and crossed to the east bank without having to swim. The padres immediately : . . . followed him on horseback a little lower down, and when half way across, the two horses which went ahead lost their footing and swam a short distance. We waited, although in some peril, until the first wader returned from the other side to guide us and then we crossed with ease, the horses not having to swim at all. We notified the rest of our companions, who had remained at San Vicente, that with lassoes and ropes they should let the pack saddles and other effects, down a not very high cliff to the bend of the ford, and that they should bring the animals by the route over which we had come.23 At a point immediately west of the west end of the ford, there is a depression or low spot in the perpendicular cliffs of the canyon wall.

At one point in the low spot a person can easily reach a position not more than fifty or sixty feet above the sandbar below. It was evidently from this point that the camp gear was lowered over the cliff to the sandbar. When this task had been accomplished, the animals were brought to the base of the cliff by way of the route the advance group had pioneered. There the packs were again loaded and all made the crossing without incident, accomplishing the feat by five o'clock in the afternoon. After such a long and difficult search for the ford, it is understandable that the company should have held a mild celebration on the east bank of the Colorado by:

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. . . praising God our Lord and firing off a few muskets as a sign of the great joy which we all felt at having overcome so great a difficulty and which had cost us so much labor and delay. . . . But doubtless God disposed that we should not obtain a guide, perhaps as a benign punishment for our sins, or perhaps in order that we might acquire some knowledge of the people who live in these parts. May His holy will be done in all things and His holy name glorified.

The ford of the river is very good and here it must be a mile wide, or a little more. 24 Before reaching this place the Navajo 25 and Dolores rivers have united, together with all those which we have mentioned in this diary as entering one or the other. And in no place which we have seen along here is it possible to establish on the banks any settlement whatsoever, or even to travel on either bank a good day's journey either downstream or upstream with the hope that its water might serve for men and animals, because, aside from the bad terrain, the river runs in a very deep gorge. All the region nearest to the ford has very high cliffs and peaks. Eight or ten leagues to the northeast of the ford there is a high, rounded peak which the Payuchis, whose country begins here, call Tucane, which means Black Peak, 26 and it is the only one hereabouts which can be seen close at hand from die river crossing.

On this eastern bank, at the very ford which we called La Purisima Concepcion de la Virgen Santisima, there is a fair-sized valley of good pasturage. 2 ' In it we spent the night and observed its latitude by the north star, and it is 36° and 55'. 28 No time could be lost now that the Colorado had been crossed. It was late in the year, the weather was getting progressively colder, and many miles of unknown trail still separated the company from Santa Fe. Early the following morning the journey was resumed. A wellworn Indian trail led up the slope eastward from the campsite to the base of some cliffs about halfway between the river and the top of the ridge. From that point it turned to the south over rough but passable terrain, enabling the party to cover six leagues before evening, the longest day's march since their arrival at Glen Canyon. 29 T h e route took them southward along the west base of Tse Tonte toward the confluence of Navajo and Kaibito creeks; Tower Butte was in clear view to the west.

As the expedition approached the brink of Navajo Creek they lost the trail in the rocks and were forced to pitch camp, naming the site

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San Miguel. Unable to locate the trail the following morning, the party turned to the east and wandered approximately six miles into some very rough country north of Navajo Creek, where they were again halted by impassable terrain. Indians encountered there told the Spaniards that they were going in the wrong direction and would have to backtrack to the previous night's camp and then follow a southwesterly course that would lead down into Navajo Creek Canyon. Two days were lost in this detour, and on November 10 camp was pitched in rough terrain just above the beginning of the descent, not more than a mile southeast of San Miguel.

Early on November 11 the expedition worked its way down the difficult and dangerous trail to the bottom of Navajo Creek, then headed upstream to the forks and followed Kaibito Creek for a short distance before climbing out on the east side.30 The route led southward along the east side of Kaibito Creek Canyon where the company camped, some six miles north of Kaibito Spring. Next day they passed the spring (the present site of the Indian school and trading post of Kaibito) and continued on their journey to the south.

There is no place in this report for a complete account of the expedition's return to Santa Fe. Suffice it to say that eventually they arrived at their destination, January 2, 1777, having given more than five months to one of the most remarkable explorations in the history of the Great American West and having discovered Glen Canyon en route.

NOTES 1

Herbert E. Bolton's Pageant in the Wilderness, which was published as volume XVIII of the Utah Historical Quarterly (1950), has been relied upon for the text of Escalante's journal and for a general account of the incidents leading to the DominguezEscalante expedition. Dr. Bolton traversed most of the route in connection with the editing of the journal, but that portion lying between Lee's Ferry and t h e San Miguel campsite was neglected, primarily because of the remoteness of the area and the lack of passable roads into it. As a result, the current study required considerable field work, for it is necessary to see the country in order to identify the places described by Escalante and to appreciate the problems encountered and the achievements of that Spanish party in 1776. Of course, the padres did not realize that the portion of the mighty Colorado which they had discovered and explored was the lower part of what is now known as Glen Canyon.

Almost a century later, the John Wesley Powell Colorado River expeditions of 1869 and 1871, working their way slowly downstream, gave appropriate names to various segments of the river gorge. After battling the numerous rapids of Cataract Canyon, the party was pleasantly surprised to find a stretch of smooth calm water, where they floated without danger and with little effort through the heart of a scenic wonderland. So impressed were members of the 1871 expedition that they named this beautiful portion of the river "Glen Canyon." It extends from the mouth of Fremont River to the Paria at Lee's Ferry, a distance of 170 miles.

2 The journal was written in the first person plural, and was signed by both leaders.

Whenever decisions were arrived at or record made in the journal, it was most often stated that " w e " decided or " w e " crossed in safety, etc. There seems to have been very close harmony between the two leaders.

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3 Miera's report is included in Bolton's Pageant in the Wilderness, 243-50. * The Escalante journal entry of October 5 notes that Cisneros had to punish his servant Lucero. Reference is made to "the servants" in the entry of October 26, but they are not identified.

5 C. Gregory Crampton, "The Discovery of the Green River," Utah Historical Quarterly, XX (October, 1952), 300-12, is an excellent account of that part of the DominguezEscalante expedition.

6 On November 7 Escalante records that they took with them the two genizaros, Felipe and Juan Domingo, to examine the ford at the Crossing of die Fathers because diey were good swimmers. These were probably die two who swam die river at the site of Lee's Ferry on October 26.

7 Bolton, op. cit., 219, 220.

8 Almost a century after the Spanish failure to cross the Colorado at this point, John D. Lee built a ferry there which provided the only satisfactory river crossing for vehicles between that point and Moab. Until the Navajo Bridge replaced it in 1929, the ferry at that site was a vital link in the transportation and communication between Utah and Arizona settlements.

"Bolton, op. cit., 221. "'Ibid., 222.

"According to Dr. Walter P. Cottam, professor and head of the Department of Botany, University of Utah, this fruit was probably hackberries, which are found in abundance along the Colorado.

12 Bolton, op. cit., 222, 223.

13 Ibid., 223.

14 This huge mesa, heretofore unnamed, is one of the outstanding landmarks of die area. The name which has been given it was suggested by Escalante's designation of the campsite near its base. See accompanying map.

15 Bolton, op. cit., 224.

10 From their campsite of Santa Francisca Romana to the crossing of Gunsight Canyon, they should have been on the main-traveled trail to the ford, for it followed that exact route. Yet Escalante makes no mention of it. Instead of turning to die right (south) from the Gunsight Canyon crossing in order to skirt the south end of Gunsight Butte, as the padres had done, the main trail took a left course — upstream — for nearly a mile, then turned almost due east through Gunsight Pass. Once through the pass a rough but passable trail led to the north brink of Navajo Canyon (Padre Creek) direcdy opposite the point on die south bank reached by die Spanish party. A series of rough-hewn steps and fills still mark die trail down to the canyon floor from the north rim. The padres probably missed the main-traveled trail through Gunsight Pass because the pass is not visible from the point where die expedition turned south after having crossed Gunsight Canyon. Although die main trail may have been visible, even in a heavy rain storm, expedition leaders would logically have been reluctant to follow it, for it seemed to lead only into tiie high mesas to die north, not to the river. " This camp was not right on the Glen Canyon rim as has been assumed by some people. The fact that die reports of Cisneros and two others sent to explore the area seem to have been received by the padres as new information would indicate that die camp was not located in view of the Colorado waters. It was situated a half-mile or more to the west, on a rough rocky plain.

"This is Escalante's first reference to Navajo Canyon (Padre Creek), by which the expedition gained access to the Colorado die following day. Although the ford used by die Spaniards in 1776 saw spasmodic use for more than a century, it ultimately fell into disuse before 1900. Even die exact location of the Crossing was lost for several decades — although it may have been known to some ranchers and river explorers — and was not definitely relocated and the location made known to die public until 1937, as a result of intensive field work under the direction of Dr. Russell G. Frazier, Charles Kelly, and Byron Davies. The following year members of the Julius F. Stone expedition named the access canyon "Padre Creek" in honor of its discoverers and placed a plaque there to

DISCOVERY

OF GLEN CANYON

237

mark the spot. See Russell G. Frazier, "El Vado de los Padres," Desert Magazine (July, 1940), 3-5.

"Padre Creek" should become the official title, since we now know that it was there and not at Kane Wash that the Spanish party approached the Colorado and forded it at the Crossing of the Fathers. In retaining the present designation of "Navajo Canyon" there is danger that "Padre Creek" will be confused widi Navajo Creek, already identified, which enters the Colorado from the opposite side, fifteen miles downstream. But this is a matter for the United States Board on Geographic Names. Only recently (1957) has the Crossing of the Fathers been identified correctly on official government maps.

Lucrecio, equipped with one horse, had been sent across the Colorado from camp San Carlos to examine the canyon of Navajo Creek in search of a possible trail out toward the east and south. T w o days later Andres Munis had left the Santa Francisca camp in search of Lucrecio. It is assumed that the two men in rejoining the main company had followed the tracks of the Escalante party, bringing the horse with them. The expedition was at full strength again, diirteen men.

20 Three varas would be somewhat under nine feet. Since the Spaniards passed that way on November 7, 1776, other travelers using the ford found it desirable to cut additional steps or notches in the solid sandstone as a means of securing better footing for their animals and probably for diemselves. Today there is no unanimity of opinion as to which of these various cuttings was the work of the original explorers.

21 Escalante states: "We went down die canyon and having traveled a mile we descended to the river. . . ." Yet the location of the steps is less than a quarter-mile above the mouth of Navajo Canyon [Padre Creek]. Escalante's "mile" might be the estimated distance from camp San Vicente Ferrer to the Colorado. Moreover, he also estimates the width of the river at the ford as a "mile or a little more." Both of these might be simple overestimates of the distance covered, but this does not seem quite likely. Escalante usually recorded distances in leagues, and his use of the term "mile" may have been to indicate a unit much shorter than is generally believed. The two distances â&#x20AC;&#x201D; from the steps to the mouth of "Padre Creek" and from die west side of the Colorado to the east side,, via the ford â&#x20AC;&#x201D; are about the same.

22 Bolton, op. cit., 224, 225. On April 1, 1957, a group found it impossible to go downstream from die mouth of Navajo Canyon because of deep water flowing at the base of a perpendicular wall. But conditions change from season to season and from year to year, and although the padres passed in safety, the route would never be safe except under the most favorable circumstances.

23 Bolton, loc. cit. " See note 21 above.

20 T h e San Juan River.

26 This is Navajo Mountain, which juts more than 10,000 feet into the sky approximately twenty-five miles east of the Crossing of the Fathers.

27 Just below the ford at the Crossing, the Colorado makes a sharp turn to the left.

As a result the main current sweeps against the right (west) rim immediately below the sandbar from which the Spaniards had entered the river at the west side of the ford. This river bend and resulting current pattern have resulted in the creation of a sandbar on the east side opposite the bend. (This condition is repeated in many places inside Glen Canyon.) On this bar the padres found good pasturage for their animals and were happy to camp there for the night.

28 Actually the southern boundary of Utah is die thirty-sevendi parallel. Camp Concepcion was located almost exactly three miles north of that line. " ' I n 1957 a party crossed the Colorado at the moudi of Kane Wash, picked up the well-worn trail used by the Spanish party and followed it for some distance to the soudi.

Herbert E. Bolton covered die region south of camp San Miguel, and A. R. Mortensen confirmed his findings as a result of two field trips into the area during 1955 and 1956.

30 The old trail, still in use, leads down into Navajo Creek about a quarter of a mile below its confluence with Kaibito Creek. Once in the bottom, the expedition followed this trail upstream some three hundred yards into Kaibito Canyon before climbing out to the east, still on the old trail.

The Needles area with the Abajos in the distance. These interesting erosion forms are in extremely primitive country. Photos courtesy W. C. Lee. The confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers, looking northeast toward the La Sal Mountains.

DEAD HORSE POINT IN RAINBOW LAND

By Josephine Fabian*

Utah has inherited some priceless possessions whose age defies the imagination. Like many family heirlooms, ignored as "old stuff" by some, cast off for the new by others, they keep cropping up here and there until an appreciation of their antiquity brings them into proper focus. A sentimental relative or a studious historian may polish them up and preserve them for the next generation. A few withstand the ravages of time. One such treasure gives Utah a unique position in the world today. Tucked away in the eastern expanse from the northern to the southern border of the state, a virtual "Biography of the Earth" has been written. The story begins almost at the moment the earth fell away from the sun, and the vicissitudes of the young earth in a universe of planets and stars, satellites, and revolving bits and pieces is forcefully and vividly told.

As with most historians, Earth accumulated a great deal of material but was a long time getting around to writing down the record. The colossal job of digging down to her core to find out what made her tick, however, was not left to latter-day archeologists. Accommodatingly, a few million years ago Earth found a way to tell her story. She used a wonderful device. Out of all the elements she had employed in growing * Mrs. Fabian has long been interested in the history of die scenic West and has written on Wyoming's famed Jackson Hole country.

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UTAH HISTORICAL

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up—the heat she had with her from the sun, the atmosphere, upheavals, erosion, earthquakes, volcanoes, oceans, tides, lakes — she saved the job of "making the record" for a couple of upstarts.

Two western rivers, to be known in the remote nineteenth century A.D. as the Green and the Grand (Colorado), were set to work. Their task was to roll back history by cutting away the outside surface of the earth, on down, into and through all the formations, until some of the first layers of the earth's skin were reached. Relentlessly, the rivers carved and threaded their way, working on a gigantic scale to lay open the canyons of the Green and the Colorado and to reveal for posterity the secrets of the earth's formation, her turbulent youth and her development to a robust maturity at which she would boast of a diameter of 7,926 miles, a circumference of 24,902 miles, and a weight of 6.6 sextillion tons! The repositories of this fabulous record are the natural bookshelves stretching upward from the shorelines of the two rivers along their steep, high, canyon walls. The full length covers 1,030 miles. Of these, 760 miles are in Utah from the upper reaches where the rivers began their carving down to die state line. Two hundred and seventy miles, which include the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, are in Arizona.

Utah inherited most of the book!

The two great rivers did most of the "writing," but Nature provided many collaborators — the wind, the rain, the elements — to draw scenes, descriptions of which range from angelic likenesses to Dante's Inferno.

Then, as though inspired to imitate Nature in her recording work, the earliest inhabitants of Utah found a way to help with the record. The Indian people chipped away on the rocks and stones, and in simple but graphic ways told parts of their own living story. Many such records, now thousands of years old, are filed away along remote canyon walls.

Some can be reached and read only if one is willing to scramble down steep ledges; others are accessible only by boat on the rivers themselves.

Many of these priceless stories may still be undiscovered; others have been studied, photographed, and in some cases destroyed by carelessness and wanton lack of appreciation; and still others are soon to be lost forever in the progress of man as he inundates much of this precious heritage with dams along the Green and Colorado waterways.

The rivers and the Indians were the only scribes until the year 1776, an important year in the human history of our whole nation. The little fringe of eastern colonists hanging tenaciously to the Atlantic Coast, who were trying to establish a new homeland and a new and lasting government, had hacked their way only to the forests of Pennsylvania.

DEAD HORSE POINT

241

The vast limitless country to the west was unknown to them. Yet many years before this time there were well-established missions thriving in New Mexico. Spanish padres were living among and converting the Indians to Christianity. And at the very time the Declaration of Independence was being born, the Franciscan fathers, Francisco Antanasio Dominguez and Silvester Velez de Escalante, with their small band were padding and trodding their way into the Great Basin, exploring, mapping, and naming the terrain from Santa Fe, New Mexico, through much of Utah and back to their point of beginning. Certainly die Fourth of July fireworks celebrating 1776 should have one great flare for Father Escalante, who with pen and ink set down in his nowfamous Journal the detailed findings of his group as they trod the paths of the great rivers. It was he who wrote another chapter and opened a whole new vista as the white man discovered and laid claim to the boundless and fascinating land of the Green and the Colorado rivers.

Following the padres came other explorers, scientists, and students, who worked over the old "biography," and its value began to be recognized. Explorations in recent decades have brought to light new facts of history, and the reports and findings are available in libraries throughout the country. Caves and deep recesses along the canyon walls and river banks have revealed the habitations of mankind, some said to be over 15,000 years old. Investigation has uncovered petroglyphs and pictographs depicting much that was unknown, and excavations have disclosed evidences of life from its very beginning — fossils and skeletons classified as those of the giant mastodon and dinosaur down to the tiny eohippus, forefather of the western pony.

Dead Horse Point, one of the most spectacular places in southeastern Utah, is like an index finger to the vast country which holds these and many other wonders in its embrace. Geographically, the Point comes as a surprise, for it is reached by a fairly good automobile road along the high mesa country, about thirty-three miles from Moab, Utah.

But suddenly the road ends, and a few short steps from the road the earth seems to end —at a precipice — where 3,000 feet straight down the sheer rugged wall of the canyon the Colorado River is winding and twisting its way to meet the Green. The view is breathtaking, not only the scene below — the sprawling river and the weathered canyon walls which it has been chiseling through for millions of years — but the scene above, if the eyes can be pulled away from the dark depths of the "Grand Canyon" and focused on the horizon. For there, stretched out in all directions, is limitless expanse, with a panoramic view of the high

Rainbow Bridge, now almost inaccessible, will be easily reached via the lake which will be formed upon completion of Glen Canyon Dam.

Goosenec\s of the San Juan. This twisting canyon was carved into the desert plateau by the San fuan River on its way to meet the Colorado.

^^^7^7mmM$^mm^ PHOTOS HAL RUMEL

DEAD

HORSE POINT

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La Sal Mountains to the east, the Abajo Mountains to the south, the Henry Mountains to the southwest, the Boulder and Thousand Lake mountains to the west, and the high Uintas to the north. Hidden in that expanse are many of the wonders of the world, some of Utah's greatest treasures, whose alluring names only increase the spell of the moment at Dead Horse Point â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the Valley of the Goblins, Circle Cliffs, Cathedrals in Stone, Capitol Reef, the San Rafael Swell, the wondrous and weird Upheaval Dome (the only thing like it in the world), rainbow bridges, arches, colorful monoliths and monuments, and always the canyons made by the rivers while writing the story of the earth.

A short distance below Dead Horse Point the well-named greenish water of the Green River curls around Junction Butte and heads straight into the path of the Colorado. Once joined, each river seems to try to maintain its long and hard-won individuality; they edge along, the red of the Colorado at the left and the green of the Green at the right, reluctant to mesh. Torrential as they are at some places along their courses, they seem strangely less agitated at this point where the Green River loses its identity and blends into the Colorado for the rest of the work ahead.

Witnessing the indescribable grandeur and the magnitude of the scene from Dead Horse Point is a soul-stirring experience. Yet the Point bears no noble sobriquet to describe it. Rather, it takes its name from an episode in the human side of the story which was enacted in the "hell-for-leather" days of the pioneer West when Butch Cassidy and his gang were busy with their profession of "outlawing." They respected the beautiful old canyons and ravines of southeastern Utah only when they could serve as robbers' roosts, as hide-outs, or as a lure and trap to capture the wily mustangs.

The horse did play a big part in the history of the country. Hardy, hot-blooded mustangs, descendants of the animals brought to the territory by the Spaniards, ran wild from the Pacific Coast to the Rio Grande, and at one period in western history it is said there were more than a million of these horses roaming the land. Herded, corralled, roped, and broken, thousands were mustered into service to help tame the West. Many, however, could never be caught. They, like the great Indian tribes, claimed all of the West as their unfenced home, and accounts of roundups organized to plunder and kill hundreds of these stalwart wild horses still stir the blood and ire of horse fanciers and true westerners.

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UTAH HISTORICAL

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The story of Dead Horse Point is no less appalling. As reported by a resident of Moab,1 it is somewhat as follows: "Before the turn of the century a very profitable business in the Big Flat area consisted of corralling wild horses and shipping them to Kansas City, Missouri. There they brought fair prices, and some of the Missouri farmers were able to tame them enough to serve as work animals. It is said that in the attempt to domesticate them many gave up in desperation because the plains-loving creatures could not adapt themselves to harness or saddle.

"Due to the peculiar terrain of the point area (400 yards at the widest and 60 yards at the neck), which offered no escape except through the narrow entrance way, the cowboys of the plains were able to use this natural corral as a retaining and grading spot for the mustangs.

"For a few years before 1900 each season saw trainloads of the broomtails head for the eastern market. The best season provided seven trainloads, and all of the horses had served time corralled on Dead Horse Point. From there they were driven to Thompson, Utah, and loaded.

"The cowboys were not usually a heartless bunch in their treatment of animals, but in this particular case they did give the mustangs more credit for horse sense than they rightfully deserved. In their haste to make the train in this last good season of horseflesh harvest, the herders left about fifty head of culls on the point. The participants of the roundup swore, or agreed to swear, on a stack of Bibles higher than the point itself that the corral gate was left open so the animals could return to their happy feeding grounds in Gray's pasture, a luscious grazing ground to the south."

Whatever the circumstances, the abandoned horses were left on this waterless point. They raced around aimlessly, stopping only to peer over the edges of the cliff, 3,000 feet to the river, until they died of exhaustion and thirst within sight of water they could never reach. This story has become almost a legend, and occasionally other names are suggested for this unusual place; but the name Dead Horse Point seems to stick as it gradually mellows into an over-all reminder of the part the horse played in the making of the West.

Automobiles, trucks, jeeps, even airplanes have taken the place of the faithful horse in the great country of the Green and the Colorado.

Where the padded footfall of the padres, roving Indian tribes, and wild horses made trails in the red dust, there are now roadways, some highways, and an occasional air strip. Colonizing, prospecting, grazing, oil 1

Mr. F. M. Pimpell, Secretary, Moab Chamber of Commerce.

DEAD HORSE POINT

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wells and uranium mines have led many to make their homes in the vicinity; others, intrigued by the thrill of river-running, have explored the rivers in boats. Probably the most famous name among the latter is that of John Wesley Powell, who has left thrill-packed accounts and much scientific information about the rivers and their tributaries. Conservation has played its part; there are National Forests and small National Parks and Monuments to protect special features.

The lure of the wide open spaces, the magnificent scenery, the phenomena of archeological discoveries, the excitement of river trips, exploring, motoring, horseback riding, and hiking (for there are some remote areas which defy access by man's inventions and are accessible only by saddle horse or on foot), all have brought increasing numbers of visitors to the whole area. Since the end of World War II, this great influx has shown the importance and value of the fantastic antique which Utah inherited. On the other hand, greater demands for the waters of all western rivers have forced the damming and flooding of much of the land adjacent to her mighty rivers. Flaming Gorge Dam will bury forever many of the treasures along the upper course of the Green River; Glen Canyon Dam will put under water the old wagon trail which once led through the famous "Hole-in-the-Rock," and when completed it will have inundated those early paths of the padres into the lands of the Colorado and obliterated entirely the steps carved for the horses to reach the famous "Crossing of the Fathers." There will be created a lake whose shoreline will measure over a thousand miles, and the body of water will reach distances the venerable Father Escalante in his wildest fancy could not have envisioned, either by mirage or miracle.

"The Crossing of the Fathers" must go, and much of Earth's story is going or has gone in the path of reclamation. How fortunate, then, that in the infinite wisdom of the Maker of all things, the beginning of an imperishable record was made by Father Escalante in 1776, and the history of some of Utah's heirlooms will not be lost in the sea of commerce as the rivers of civilization flow more and more rapidly down their relentless course. Soon Dead Horse Point will look downstream to a new wonder â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the man-made lake formed by the Glen Canyon Dam, a body of water for which the desert has thirsted for centuries; and at the same time, it now seems to be pointing to a new horizon â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the preservation and protection of the vast expanse which Nature endowed with wonders beyond measure and bequeathed to Utah in trust for posterity.

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Moon Lake in the High Uintas, located directly south of King's Peak- Photo courtesy W. C. Lee.

Split Mountain from headquarters approach road. Courtesy Jess Lombard, Dinosaur National Monument.

Petroglyphs on canyon wall Park- Photo Jess Lombard.

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^Dinosaur National Monument (in the Uinta Basin) with its outstanding scientific and scenic interests is one of the most unique and colorful areas in the entire National Park System.

DINOSAUR

COUNTRY

By G. E. Untermann and B. R. Untermann*

Since countries, like people, have a background, it will be well to begin with the background of the Uinta country of northeastern Utah.

The real history of this area began with the initial uplifting of the Uinta Mountains, the largest east-west trending range in the Western Hemisphere, near the close of the Cretaceous period, along with the Wasatch and Rocky Mountain systems and the development of the depression on the south flank of the Uintas known as the Uinta Basin.

Weathering and erosion during the sixty million years which followed have carved the spectacular scenery we enjoy in this region today.

Prior to the elevation of the Uintas this section of Utah was frequently occupied by seaways, over vast periods of time, in which were deposited the sediments destined to become the quartzites, sandstones, shales, and limestones forming the principal mountain mass. Subsequent erosion of the range supplied the sediments now comprising the Uinta Basin. The Uinta Basin is a natural depression lying in northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado. It comprises all of Duchesne and Uintah 1 counties, Utah, the western half of Rio Blanco County, Colorado, and the southwest corner of Moffat County, Colorado. All the principal drainage is into the Green River. * G. E. Untermann is director of the Utah Field House of Natural History, Vernal State Park, Vernal, Utah. Mrs. Untermann is the museum's staff scientist and technician and collaborated in the preparation of diis article.

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UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Human history in the Uinta country is of considerable antiquity.

Indirect evidence would seem to indicate that primitive man in America may have strayed into the Uinta Basin in the course of his migrations some fifteen to twenty thousand years ago or earlier. Dates given for primitive cultures are somewhat flexible, so that a specific chronology is rather difficult to assume. Nor is it certain that such Folsom, Yuma, or Clovis-like points found in the area were left by these people or brought in later. But it is certain that man in the Uinta Basin is of great antiquity and, like ancient man in other parts of the Southwest, may have been here much earlier than now appears to have been the case.

Evidence of the presence of the Basin's first farmers is more direct and is documented by an abundance of well-preserved artifacts, skeletal remains, petroglyphs, and dwelling sites. These early residents (Basketmaker II) were already practicing small-scale irrigation at the beginning of the Christian Era, nearly two thousand years before the Mormon pioneers became the first Anglo-Saxons to divert water from streams for the growing of crops. The cultivation of corn and squash by these Basketmaker people marked the beginning of a sedentary life and the waning of a nomadic existence dominated by the pursuit of game as the mainstay of survival. The farmer had now begun to replace the hunter, who was relegated to a supplementary role in supplying the larder.

No agricultural surpluses plagued these struggling farmers, who were forced not only to fight against the fickleness of nature but also to defend their meager stores from the raids of less enterprising enemies.

Basketmaker III (Modified Basketmakers who had advanced to pottery) and Pueblos bridged the gap between the early farmers and the ancestors of the Utes who formed the reception committee that greeted Father Escalante and his party â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the first white men to enter Utah â&#x20AC;&#x201D; on September 13, 1776, when they crossed the Green River five miles above the present site of the town of Jensen.

William Henry Ashley, trapper and fur trader of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, came into the Basin in 1825 following beaver signs.

Today his name has been given to Ashley Creek, Ashley Valley, Ashley National Forest, and Ashley "Falls" on the Green River.

Upon leaving the Basin in the winter of 1825-26, Ashley wanted to store some of his equipment until his return the following spring and asked a Ute chief if he thought his belongings would be safe. "Him safe," replied the chief, "no white man for thousand miles." The chief's interpretation of the relative "morality" of white man and Indian has merit, as any student of white and Indian relationships is aware. The

DINOSAUR COUNTRY

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dime novel version of the Indian as a treacherous, thieving, murderous savage leaves much to be desired when compared with the white man's record of infamous dealings with native Americans!

In 1832 Antoine Robidoux, a trapper and fur trader of French descent, established Fort Robidoux at the junction of the Uinta and Whiterocks rivers, near the present site of Whiterocks. This was the first white settlement in the Basin and in Utah. It survived for twelve years, or until 1844, when it was burned to the ground by the Indians.

Maddened by Robidoux's unprincipled rascality and cruelty and his enslavement of Indian women and children, the Utes sought a just revenge by leveling the fort. Historians have implied the regret that Robidoux was away during the burning of his post, hinting that greater justice would have been done had he also been destroyed. Robidoux, as is frequently the case with men of violence, died peacefully in bed in 1860 at the age of sixty-six.2 Although Mormon pioneers came to Utah in 1847, no attempt was made to colonize the Uinta Basin until the late summer of 1861. Brigham Young had heard glowing accounts of the area from traders and trappers, so in August of 1861 he announced that the Basin would be settled to care for the overflow arrivals in Salt Lake Valley, and also to precede the United States government to that section since it was being planned to establish an Indian reservation along the Uinta River. Early in September of that year a small scouting party set out to pave the way for the main group of settlers, but, failing to find the paradise described by the trappers, returned to Salt Lake City to report that the Basin was not as represented and that all the area was good for was to "hold the world together." Those settlers who were destined for the Uinta Basin went to southern Utah instead.

Upon recommendation of Caleb B. Smith, Secretary of the Interior, President Lincoln proclaimed a large part of the Uinta country an Indian reservation on the third of October, 1861. The first Indian agency was established in Daniels Canyon east of Heber in 1864. In 1865 it was moved to the Duchesne River at the foot of Tabby Mountain near the present site of Hanna. The third move occurred in the spring of 1868 when the agency was moved on east to Rock Creek, and in the same year, on Christmas Day, it was again moved to Whiterocks, between the Uinta and Whiterocks rivers a short distance above their confluence.

Whiterocks, close by old Fort Robidoux, thus became the oldest site of continuous settlement in the Uinta Basin.

250

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Major John Wesley Powell, in passing through the Basin during his Colorado River exploration of 1869, visited the Whiterocks Indian Agency on July 1 of that year to leave letters for mailing.

In the early seventies, white personnel from the Indian agency became the first settlers to take up homesteads off the reservation. By 1880 the population had become sufficient to organize Uintah County, which then also included the present Daggett County on the north side of the Uinta Mountain summit.

The opening of the Uintah Indian Reservation to homesteaders in August, 1905, was a shameful episode in the government's dealings with the American Indian. The reservation was established with the agreement that it belonged to the Indians and that only an affirmative vote by two-thirds of the male tribal members could ever open a portion of it to settlement. The Indians considered the reservation their home and did not want to part with any of it. But the Great White Father had failed them once more. For a full year before an effort was made to determine how the Indians felt about parting with a portion of their last remaining lands, Congress had already passed a law opening the reservation to homesteaders. The Great White Father had spoken and given the Indians no voice in deciding their own fate. Furs, minerals, and lands have always been a "justification" for the white man's pillage of the Indian's property.

Livestock and farming have long represented the basic economy of the Uinta Basin and remain the stabilizing factors down to the present time. These activities have been augmented by lumbering, mining (principally of gilsonite, a solid hydrocarbon), and by the discovery of oil when on September 18, 1948, Utah's first commercial well came into production in the Ashley Valley field, ten miles east of Vernal. Uintah County now (March 1, 1958) has approximately one hundred producing wells, mainly in the Red Wash and Ashley Valley fields. Drilling continues in the area.

The Basin contains vast potential resources in which are included an estimated fifty billion barrels of recoverable oil from the Eocene oil shales, between two and three billion tons of asphalt, and two billion tons of phosphate rock. With this wealth of undeveloped resources and with Flaming Gorge Dam now being constructed on the Green River, the Uinta Basin may well continue to help "hold the world together" â&#x20AC;&#x201D; economically.

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RECREATIONAL RESOURCES Dinosaur National

Monument:

One of the most unique and colorful areas in the-entire National Park system is Dinosaur National Monument with its outstanding scientific and scenic interests. The Dinosaur Quarry, six miles north of Jensen, Utah, is world famous for the quantity, variety, and fine degree of preservation of the fossils it has produced. Twenty-three nearly complete skeletons were recovered, representing twelve different species of dinosaurs, most of which were beautifully preserved and as hard as the enclosing rock. The quarry and Split Mountain section nearby are replete with a great variety of material of geologic interest. The dinosaur fossils themselves occur in the Morrison Formation of Upper Jurassic Age and were laid down in an old stream channel one hundred forty million years ago. The quarry represents a sandbar or quiet cove in this ancient stream where the dinosaurs were washed in and lodged in large numbers just as driftwood lodges along sandbars in rivers today.

P H O T O C O U R T E S Y J E S S L O M B A R D , DINOSAUR N A T I O N A L M O N U M E N T

Reliefing operations, dinosaur quarry. Several partial dinosaur skeletons and huge isolated bones have been outlined in high relief on the walls.

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UTAH HISTORICAL

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The history of the quarry began when Professor Earl Douglass of the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, discovered outcropping fossil bones on August 19, 1909. The excavation of the bones developed the quarry, which was operated by the Carnegie Museum until 1923. In 1923-24 the National Museum, Washington, D.C., and the University of Utah collected material at the site. No fossils have been removed by anyone since 1924.

It has long been the plan to relief some of the remaining fossil material on the quarry face, leaving it etched out to form a striking exhibit-in-place. Not until national attention was focused on Dinosaur National Monument through the publicity it received as a result of the controversial Echo Park Dam debate were funds made available for die development of the quarry program, which has now become a part of the Park Service Mission 66. This ten-year program for the improvement of National Park Service areas has made several million dollars available for the development of Dinosaur. By June 15, 1958, the new Visitor Center and Museum at the quarry will be opened to the public.

The north wall of this unique structure will be die quarry face itself, upon which are reliefed the dinosaur bones, left in place just as nature deposited them. This will be one of the most striking exhibits to be seen anywhere.

During the operation of the quarry by Professor Douglass, he was plagued by theft of his fossil material and by vandalism. In the hope that he would have better control of the fossil deposits he tried to stake them out as a mining claim. However, he was told by uninformed personnel of the Department of the Interior, in Washington, that fossils were not minerals and that he would not be permitted to stake his claim.

Actually, most fossils are replaced by minerals of one kind or another, so they are minerals; but official Washington was not aware of this, and the professor's petition was denied. As a last resort he sought to have the quarry set aside as a National Monument and was successful in this when President Woodrow Wilson so proclaimed the eighty acres comprising the quarry area, on October 4, 1915. In 1938 the Monument was enlarged to 204,000 acres to include the scenic canyons of the Green and Yampa rivers. As now constituted three-fourths of Dinosaur National Monument lies in northwestern Colorado, a portion included in what is known as the Canyon Unit.

The magnificent scenery of the Monument is due largely to the canyons of the Green and Yampa and adjacent areas. They vary in depth from twenty-five hundred to three thousand feet and range in

DINOSAUR

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color through the spectrum, due to the many different geologic formations represented. Green River canyons are: Split Mountain, the mouth of which is but three miles from the quarry and is the site of the maim campground; Whirlpool; and Lodore. Bear Canyon runs its length in the Monument on the Yampa. Boat trips, running the rapids through these canyons, are conducted by competent rivermen and are actually the best way for nature lovers to see the canyon country of the Monument. Secondary roads, some now being improved, give access to such scenic areas in the Monument as Island Park, Harpers Corner, Pats Hole, and the head of Lodore Canyon.

There are no accommodations for visitors in the Monument other than campground facilities. Vernal, nineteen miles west of the quarry, is the nearest town. Excellent motels, hotels, and restaurants are available there. Vernal is also the focal point from which to reach many other attractions in the eastern end of the Uinta Basin. It is the site of the State Museum, the Utah Field House of Natural History, which maintains a State Tourist Information Center. All visitors are urged to

P H O T O C O U R T E S Y G.

UNTERMANN

An authentic cement replica of Diplodocus, "Dippy" (76 feet long, 21 feet high at head), may be seen at the Field House of Natural History.

DINOSAUR

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call at the museum for detailed information about Dinosaur National Monument and other points of interest in this area.

Ashley National Forest: Within the boundaries of this great National Forest, which lies along both flanks of the Uinta Mountains and its summits, are included some of America's finest recreational areas. Scenic grandeur abounds on all sides, and its more than a dozen campgrounds and picnic areas make this beauty available to an appreciative public. Utah's highest mountain, King Peak (13,498 feet), along with many other 13,000 foot peaks, are towering guardians in Ashley National Forest. A half-dozen resorts and dude ranches cater to the needs of the visitor, all of them within the Forest. Lakes and streams are numerous, affording fine fishing and boating. Vernal, Roosevelt, and Duchesne, the three principal towns in the Uinta Basin, are the "jumping off" points to areas on the Forest. All of them have good tourist accommodations and good cafes.

Duchesne and Roosevelt are gateways to the High Uintas Wilderness Area on the Forest, and to much of the western half of Ashley National Forest itself. Vernal, headquarters for the Forest, is the gateway to most of the eastern half of this magnificent area. Here too is the start of the Vernal-Manila Highway, the only road crossing the Uinta Mountains to Green River, Wyoming, and the only road on the Forest that extends from the south to the north side of the range. This is the road to take to see Brush Creek Gorge, Red Canyon of the Green River, and the Flaming Gorge Dam now under construction. From this road also the scenic Red Cloud Loop takes off, twenty-three miles north of Vernal, to wind its way through forest and mountains on the return to Vernal by way of picturesque Dry Fork Canyon. The first thirty miles of the VernalManila highway includes "The Drive Through the Ages" with signs marking the geological formations.

Badlands of Eastern Utah: Colorful "badland" topography may be seen on U.S. 40 between Roosevelt and Vernal, and also southeast of Vernal in the Red Wash Oil Field and on the way out to the Bonanza Gilsonite Mines. Both of these last-mentioned areas are reached over paved roads. The asphalt pits just west of Vernal are impressive.

Utah Field House of Natural History: The fossil, geologic, and natural history values of the Uinta Mountain and Basin area, and the recreational, scenic magnificence, and out-

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standing resource values of the state of Utah are revealed in the museum. The geologic record of this region is imposing. More than a billion years of earth history and a five-hundred-million-year life story are unfolded in the rocks of the Uintas. Seventy-five different kinds of mammals, two hundred fifty species of birds, and over a thousand varieties of plants are represented among the present-day living organisms of this area. At the State Tourist Information Center in the museum, the visitor is oriented with respect to local and state-wide attractions. Tours are outlined and every effort is made to make his stay in Utah a memorable one.

NOTES 1

The National Board of Geographic Names applies the spelling "Uinta" to mountains, streams, and other geographic features, and the spelling "Uintah" to political subdivisions such as counties, reservations, etc.

2 It is interesting to note that he died at the home of an elder brother, Joseph, in St. Joseph, Missouri. Joseph had founded the city as a trading post on the Missouri River in 1800. The place was known as Robidoux until 1843, when Joseph himself changed the name to St. Joseph. The family was originally from St. Louis.

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Tony Grove picnic area. Tony Grove, a lake of the glacial period is located approximately 20 miles northeast of Logan and is a delightful mountain retreat. Photo courtesy Utah Tourist and Publicity Council.

ANOTHER

WAY

WEST

By Jaa\ Goodman*

Scarcely a century has passed since flesh-and-blood men and women were living the stuff of which history was made here in Utah. However, engineers rather than historians or antiquarians have laid out the region's modern highways. So it is that in only a few cases, the trails blazed by trappers and wagon trains can be followed without "leaving the pavement" of today's American road.

East of the Utah line, serious-minded sightseers entering our region find that U.S. 30 strays far from fabled South Pass. The other major artery to north central Utah, transcontinental U.S. 40, enters the Salt Lake Valley by spurning the Emigration Canyon-Little Mountain route of the Mormon trek for a later, easier gradient surveyed by Parley P. Pratt. Someday completion of a Henefer-Salt Lake City memorial highway will put rubber tires and asphalt atop the rocky ridges scoured by the wagons of the Donners and Brigham Young's initial band.

Until then, the visitor willing to swap a few extra hours and miles for bright nuggets of western history plus splendid scenery can do so most readily in northern Utah. Like the parched pioneers of emigranttrain days, he can gape at the sudden flashing views of Bear Lake on the Utah-Idaho border, sparkling like a near-mirage between semiarid * Mr. Goodman is regional correspondent for the New York Times and Information Research Specialist for the Utah State Parks Commission.

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UTAH HISTORICAL

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mountains. From there he can retrace, on good two-lane pavement, one of the first and most scenic routes across the seemingly impassable Wasatch. Following U.S. 89 today's tourist can descend, as Jim Bridger did in 1824, into the Cache Valley, the well-protected "winter quarters" of the men who trapped for beaver pelts.

Present-day voyageurs, searching out historic routes and scenery in the region west of the Continental Divide, reach the Bear via U.S. 30N from Kemmerer to Sage, Wyoming. Next, State Route 89 leads across the border and on between the Bear River Range and the first flanks of the Wasatch into Utah where State Route 3, following the route of the old Oregon Trail, leads up to Bear Lake.

Thirty miles long and more than six miles wide, the cool blue-green lake was the first sizeable body of fresh water encountered by the slowrolling wagon trains on the heartbreaking trip to the Pacific Coast.

Here both humans and beasts of burden, haggard after toiling across the Great Plains and through the Wind River country, found water enough at last. Even in today's West the sight of so much fresh water and foilage is a welcome one. The deep cool lake and irrigated farmlands around it give promise of green fields to the north and west.

From this point the Oregon Trail of yesterday and today is rarely out of sight of streams, small and large â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the Snake, the Lemhi, the Clearwater, and the Columbia. Bear Lake must have seemed an oasis, indeed the first promise of a promised land, to overland travelers a century ago.

Today, lying half in Utah and half in Idaho, the lake provides a fine overnight stopping place for wayfaring strangers and is a favorite swimming-boating-fishing center for residents of nearby range towns and cities. East of the lake there are new riches â&#x20AC;&#x201D; mines where phosphate for farm fertilizer is being hacked from deposits laid down in the Phosphoria Sea aeons and aeons earlier.

To the west of the lake, U.S. 89 climbs toward the skies through pasturelands, patriarchal cottonwoods, groves of aspen, and finally on through pine forests upward to timberline. Here the wayfarer confronts the Wasatch Range, final spine of the Rockies which once barred the pioneers from direct entry into the Great Basin.

A Utah State Historical Marker on the shores of Bear Lake testifies that the Oregon Trail turned north at this point. But the mountain men, not handicapped by wagons or carts, crossed the Wasatch at will.

At first Bridger and his fellows followed the convolutions of the roily Bear River to reach their cache, known to them as Willow Valley.

Today's highway, beautifully engineered, follows the shorter trail the

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trappers took when they were hurried — over the 7,900 foot summit and down the canyon of the Logan River to the west. If Bridger and his comrades sought scenery as well as beaver, they chose well.

Climbing some 3,000 feet in elevation in a span of eleven miles after leaving Bear Lake, the highway broadens at View Point where historyminded travelers can rest for minutes or hours, mentally tracing the path of the emigrant trains through fifty miles of Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho valleys and desert ranges. Perhaps no other panorama in all the West encompasses quite so much history as this view from the lee of Beaver Summit; perhaps no other region along the pioneer trails is as little changed as the expanse between shimmering Bear Lake and the Cache Valley.

From the 7,900 foot pass the highroad loops and winds on another thirty miles to Logan, a valley town 4,500 feet above the sea. In its descent, the route leads through a land of natural "parks," woods, and woodlands little changed since beaver-trapping days. There are dozens of beauty spots "on the Cache" — locations favored by Utah campers and hikers. Passable forest trails lead to Beaver Mountain, where the descendants of animals once harassed by the mountain men now build their dams under the protection of federal foresters. Tony Grove Lake and White Pine Lake are twin glacial tarns that Jim Bridger must have glimpsed.

Ricks Springs, a cool pool bubbling icy sweet water in a sizeable grotto, was visited by local Indian tribes as well as thirsty trappers.

A few miles to the east is Logan Cave, a cavern 700 yards long, known to have sheltered both whites and redmen from high-country blizzards in the mid-nineteenth century.

Twenty-five miles from Bear Lake a steep forest trail leads upcanyon to history of another sort — the Jardine Juniper. Forest Service naturalists believe this twisted forty-foot-high tree is the world's biggest and oldest red juniper. Twenty-six feet around, anchored in the rimrock of the Wasatch, the gnarled giant is estimated to be fully three thousand years old, although the usual life span of its species is five hundred years.

Below the Juniper Trail the paved highway follows the white water of the Logan River, a famous fishing stream in its day — and not entirely devoid of browns, natives, and rainbows in our own.

The gorge cut by the Logan is deep and narrow, shadowed by firs, pines, and peaks for a dozen miles — a canyon typical of scores through-

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UTAH HISTORICAL

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out the West down which toiling emigrant trains and freighters worked their way as the region was opened.

Suddenly, forty miles west of Bear Lake, the road breaks from the canyon mouth, crosses a terrace of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, and gives wayfaring strangers their first startled glimpse of the level valley which served as the winter cache for the beaver trappers. Today Logan, a thriving, thrifty college community, nestles in the valley. Farms, a campus, checkerboarded streets, and a Latter-day Saints temple all testify to typical Mormon country history. U.S. 89 leads on â&#x20AC;&#x201D; to Sardine Canyon, to Brigham City, to Ogden and to a broader, flatter valley which was a magnet, first for a multitude of wagon trains, then for the Iron Horse, not long after the mountain men first showed the Saints and the Argonauts the new way west.

Old Juniper. Believed to be the world's oldest red juniper, it is estimated to be three thousand years old. The trail to this ancient specimen is in Logan Canyon twenty-five miles from Bear Lake.

P H O T O H A L R U M EL

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Weathered by the winds and storms and glaring sun of the upland desert, neglected by a state to which it properly should mean much, the "Golden Spike Monument," long the sole marker to the joining of the nation's first transcontinental rails, has at last been set aside by the Department of the Interior as a National Historical Site.

The precise spot where the cowcatchers of the Central Pacific Railroad's "Jupiter" and the Union Pacific's No. 119 touched on May 10, 1869, lies fifty-two miles from Ogden and the present transcontinental rail route. Nowadays not even the sound of a locomotive whistle breaks the silence of the barren surrounding hills. A seven-acre tract bisected by a cinder-sprinkled abandoned roadbed, the site of the meeting of the rails is bounded by a few stands of wheat. A tottering ranch windmill and an empty, forlorn railroad station add to the gaunt spectral quality of the setting.

The monument itself suffered considerable neglect in bygone years.

Helpful sheepmen and a few visitors placed cairns of brick and stone around the monument base, propped up its tottering pipe-rail fence, and enshrined the empty-eyed skull of a steer on the monument step. Recently, however, the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads erected a new fence, polished the simple stone pyramid, and rechiseled its terse inscription. Now visitors can readily read the lines: Last Spike Completing First Transcontinental Railroad Driven at This Point, May 10, 1869.

To make it easier for sightseers and a new generation of railroad builders to journey this way, the Utah State Highway Commission has graded, graveled, and hard-topped the twenty miles of road which lead to Promontory from the east. Beyond rugged hills to the south and west — on the shores of the lonely saline lake — new railroading history is being written by Morrison-Knudsen construction crews pushing a twelve-mile-long, forty-million-dollar rockfill across the Great Salt Lake, replacing the timber trestle of the Lucin Cutoff.

But there is no sight or sound of the mammoth Lucin construction project visible at Promontory. Here, north and west of Ogden and Salt Lake City, in a land once swarming with Irish and Chinese gandydancers, with mule skinners, bewhiskered surveyors, military guards, and card-sharpers, nothing remains of pioneer builders except memories — memories fed by our own recollections of dim paragraphs and brave photographs in schoolroom history books and on classroom walls.

P H O T O COURTESY S O U T H E R N P A C I F I C

RAILROAD

Inset is "Camp Victory" on April 28, 1869, a few days before the Golden Spike ceremony of May 10. A modern version of the East meets West saga is shown in the rockfill forming the new Lucin Cutoff.

The redolent sagebrush, the desolate ranges skirting the Great Salt Lake, the great sweep of high-country sky, these remain as they were before the West's first rails were laid, used, and abandoned. Here is one of those singular spots where a significant sector of American history can be readily relived, where the visitor can appreciate the labors with which his grandparents or great-grandparents enriched a rugged land.

North of Ogden, against the flank of the Wasatch in the country surrounding Brigham City, the outlander finds startling resemblance to distant Pennsylvania or Upper N e w York State. But dairy farms, trim homes, and factories are left behind at tiny Corinne, the "sinful city" to pious Mormons of the railbuilding era. Beyond this near-ghost town irrigated orchards and fields dwindle and disappear. For the re-

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maining twenty-three miles to Promontory, Utah State Route 83 swings almost due west, alongside the rail-less embankment of the now abandoned pioneer line.

Beginning in 1869 and continuing for thirty-two years, this was the route of diamond-stacked, high-wheeled, wood-burning locomotives hauling passenger-car loads of emigrants to the mushrooming West.

However, this single track to the scene of the Golden Spike ceremony lost its main-line status in 1903 with the building of the $8,300,000 cutoff across the Great Salt Lake, the trestle route which will itself be replaced by the now half-finished "fill" or causeway.

The line across the lake sliced forty-four miles and a dozen steep grades from the initial transcontinental run. But from 1903 until 1942 the older route through Promontory was maintained as a Southern Pacific branch. Then rails were ripped up and sent to war, while local souvenir hunters scoured the abandoned roadbed for timeworn spikes which could be polished into paperweights.

PHOTO COURTESY SOUTHERN

PACIFIC

RAILROAD

The $8,300,000 Lucin Cutoff shortened the original line by forty-four miles and several steep grades. Note the rocking-chairs and umbrella of spectators.

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UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Today's highway traveler, paralleling the historic rail route, can perhaps appreciate the woes of the thousand or more tracklayers who blasted and shoveled their way west at a rate of ten miles per day.

Toiling across quicksand, salt flats, and the 5,000-foot-high shoulders of the Promontory Range, laborers rounded each successive ridge to find more quicksand, sage, salt, and another ridge.

But the desolate region between Corinne and Promontory contains beauty as well as history, a unique stark beauty fitted to time and clime.

Curlews, wild ducks, and herons soar from roadside marshes in season, winging southward to the nearby Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge.

Even in this day and age an occasional band of wild horses gallops downwind, away from passing cars and trucks. Now and again a sheepherder trails a flock to or from the winter range.

Road and rail-line roadbed dip down to Promontory after topping a low ridge which gives a fine panoramic view of the saline lake and the high country, forty miles west. This is a land of shimmering mirages, a land in which truncated mountains float atop the lake, a land where heat and light play strange tricks. But the visitor who in approaching the Golden Spike marker tries to conjure up the scene as it was in 1869 needs all manner of mental tricks.

Here, to a land then as now devoid of any permanent resident, a crowd of fifteen hundred streamed on that great tenth of May, 1869.

Infantrymen, two bands of Salt Lake City musicians, railroad engineers, laborers far from China and Ireland, gamblers from Corinne, Mormons from Brigham City â&#x20AC;&#x201D; less recently from Nauvoo â&#x20AC;&#x201D; workers, and regional dignitaries all gathered to watch California's Governor Leland Stanford swing at the $400 golden spike, and miss.

Ties and rails are gone now, but a branch-line wire remains to remind visitors that Telegrapher W. N. Shilling of Ogden simulated Stanford's blows with his key, tapping to the world the historic message: "The last rail is laid. The last spike is driven. The Pacific Railroad is completed. The point of junction is 1,086 miles west of die Missouri River, and 690 miles east of Sacramento City."

Today the laurel tie that held the golden spike is gone. It was removed to San Francisco immediately after the 1869 ceremony, and destroyed in the great earthquake and fire of 1906. The golden spike remains, but not in Utah. Inscribed with the date January 8,1863, marking the breaking of ground for the nation-spanning route, plus the completion date of nearly six years later, it bears also the words: "May God

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continue the unity of our country as this railroad unites the two great oceans of the world."

The property of Stanford University, the spike may be viewed by scholars who can persuade university trustees to open the vault of the Wells Fargo Bank and Union Trust Company of San Francisco, in which the relic is housed.

However, desolate Promontory near the spot where crews laid a record ten miles of rail in a day, placed 25,000 ties, drove 55,000 spikes, and fastened 14,000 bolts just before the ceremony of the golden spike â&#x20AC;&#x201D; this pinprick on the map of the West â&#x20AC;&#x201D; seems best suited to recall the event now faded into the past.

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Part of the "Carte Generate du Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne . . ." or "General Map of the Kingdom of New Spain," by Alexander von Humboldt, published in 1811. It is the first detailed map based upon actual exploration of the region which is now the state of Utah.

HUMBOLDT'S

UTAH,

181 I

By C. Gregory Crampton*

Utah's magnificent natural scenery was first revealed to public view on a comprehensive scale in 1811 through the works of the German scientist, Baron Alexander von Humboldt. In his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain he wrote of the latitudes south of Great Salt Lake when it was one of the limits of geographical knowledge in the Rocky Mountains above the Spanish settlements; his maps in the accompanying atlas extend no further north than forty-two degrees of latitude.

Humboldt described with much detail the country now shared by Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and California, then the northern frontier of the viceroyalty of New Spain, which was wholly portrayed in the essay.

As he pictured the wealth and resources of the northern Spanish provinces, Humboldt fairly prophesied the westward sweep of the United States across the continent, and it was he, one of the greatest scientists of his time, more than anyone before him, who publicized these attractions. It could scarcely have been at a more auspicious time, * Dr. Crampton is professor of history at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

Acknowledgment is made to the University of Utah Research Fund for assistance in meeting research costs, and to the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, for permission to reproduce the two maps and the portrait of Humboldt. Italics are used for names which appear on the map and to which reference is made. Numbered footnotes appear at die end of the article.

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UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

for the essay was published just as Mexico plunged into a revolutionary war for independence from Spain. The war invited attention to a region which had long lived under Spain's monopolistic control. Intercourse with the world outside was prohibited, and little was known abroad of the vast resources of Spanish North America until Humboldt's work proclaimed them to the world. He said he wanted to "contribute something to dispel the darkness which for so many ages has covered the geography of one of the finest regions of the earth." He did just that.

The Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain raised the Spanish curtain in North America to reveal in intimate detail a dazzling region which emerged as sovereign and independent Mexico when the patriots finally severed the political bond with Spain in 1821.

Some years before the revolution, with permission of the Spanish government, Humboldt, in company with the botanist Aime Bonpland, had come to Spanish America in 1799 to prosecute scientific studies which were expected to take him around the world. He spent five years in the New World, most of it in South America and Cuba. When plans failed for a voyage across the Pacific, he journeyed to New Spain and studied there for a year. The scientist traveled about some in central Mexico, and from his own observations, in conversation with learned men, and from official records in the viceregal archives which were opened to him, he gathered a mass of material upon which he based the Political Essay. The general map accompanying it was completed in preliminary draft before he left the viceroyalty. En route to Europe in 1804, Humboldt stopped briefly in the United States. He visited President Jefferson, with whom he must have had some interesting conversations about Mexico and the West, and left with the Department of State in Washington a copy of the preliminary map. The Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain was published sectionally in the original French from 1808 to 1811; the complete first edition together with a folio atlas appeared in 1811. An English edition translated by John Black was published during the same year, and a German edition (18091814) was followed by one in Spanish (1822) and others.1 The essay on New Spain contains the first detailed published description based upon actual exploration of the region which is now the state of Utah. Humboldt himself never visited the northern part of Mexico, but he talked to those who had, and he used many manuscript and printed sources which are discussed in the long geographical introduction in volume one and elsewhere throughout the work. Most of the Utah material appears on the general map accompanying it, the north-

HUMBOLDT'S UTAH

271

western part of which is reproduced here on a reduced scale.2 The boundaries of the state may be superimposed upon Humboldt's map by drawing two perpendicular lines from the northern edge of it, one at longitude 109° 23', the other at longitude 116° 23', to intersect a horizontal line drawn from the western edge of the map at the latitude of thirty-seven degrees. The northwestern boundaries may be drawn by dropping a perpendicular line at longitude 113° 23' to forty-one degrees of latitude and by extending the line along this latitude until it intersects the eastern boundary. These lines are adjusted to the Greenwich meridian from that of the observatory of Paris which Humboldt used.

He adopted Mercator's projection.

Most of the geographical features appearing on the Utah part of the map are those discovered in 1776 by the Spanish exploring party directed by friars Francisco Antanasio Dominguez and Francisco Silvestre Velez de Escalante and first laid down on maps by the expedition cartographer, Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco. Although Miera drew several maps reflecting these discoveries, none was ever printed, so far as is known, and it was left to Humboldt to publish the work of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition.3 It is not certain that Humboldt used Miera directly, for he is not acknowledged by name in the geographical introduction of the essay; but the first map Humboldt mentions there is one by Mascaro and Costanso on which Miera data have obviously been used, though again unacknowledged.^ Humboldt's "Carte Generale" is a fair reflection of Utah as it was known at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it was regarded as an authoritative work for much of the area mapped until Fremont, who recognized Humboldt's contribution and retained some of his geography, published the report of his first two exploring expeditions thirty-five years later. The modern traveler will be interested to learn how many of the scenic wonders of Utah were known, named, and found a place on Humboldt's great map of 1811. With a few, and some quite radical, adjustments the Humboldt geography may be squared with the modern map. Note that most of Humboldt's place names are in Spanish; the names of lakes and Indian tribes and explanatory and descriptive matter are in French. In the analysis of Humboldt's map to follow, we will travel counterclockwise around the state, following as it were the trail of Dominguez and Escalante as laid down by the German scientist.

The main dividing ridge of the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra de las Grullas, separates the waters of the Rio Grande del Norte, shortened

Map depicting a possible commercial route across the Rockies at the head of the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers, as suggested by Humboldt.

Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859.

Scientific traveler, author of many volumes, he helped to make America better known to the world. His Political Essay is still of primary importance.

HUMBOLDT'S UTAH

273

now to the Rio Grande, from those of the Colorado River system. The upper basin of the Colorado River is rather accurately drawn. The San Juan River is identical with the Rio Nabajoa, which receives the Rio de las Animas, the name today of a major fork heading in Colorado. The Rio de Nra. Sra. de los Dolores has been shortened by modern usage to the Dolores River, which skirts the Montagnes de Sel Gemme, a name retained partly in its Spanish form today as the La Sal Mountains, the striking peaks on the Utah-Colorado line, south of the Colorado River.

Humboldt's Rio de S. Xavier is the Gunnison; and the Rio de S. Rafael, indicated as being the major source of the Colorado, is indeed the Colorado River above the mouth of the Dolores. All of these streams and other geographical features were known to Spain before the traverse by Dominguez and Escalante in 1776. Beyond the Colorado these men pushed into country new to the whites, and they left a trail of names many of which appear on Humboldt's map.

The first considerable discovery of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition was the Green River, first seen where it was crossed just outside the southern boundary of Dinosaur National Monument. The explorers reported no fossilized bones, but they were the first to view spectacular Split Mountain, through which Green River flows in Dinosaur.5 Miera named the adjacent Yampa Plateau Sierra Verde as it appears on Humboldt's map, though too far east. The origin of the name Green River, which is still in doubt, may well be related somehow to Miera's Sierra Verde.

On Humboldt's map the Green is the Rio de S. Buenaventura, the name applied to it by the discoverers, who thought it to be a river wholly unrelated to the Colorado. Miera documented the Spaniards' conclusions when he extended the stream westward and emptied it into a salt lake which is in fact Sevier Lake! This serious error perpetuated by Humboldt confounded explorers and geographers for more than thirty years after his map appeared. Even after the Green was discovered to be a branch of the Colorado River, Humboldt's authority was so great that some cartographers identified his Rio Nabajoa with the Colorado and his Rio Zaguanganas with the Green even though the junction of the two extended below the southern boundary of Utah.6 The Sierra de Timpanogos was the name applied to the western part of the Uinta Mountains and the northern reaches of the Wasatch Mountains by the Spaniards. Miera has shown them much more accurately than Humboldt, but then Humboldt was probably using a secondary source and not Miera directly, and under these conditions his accu-

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racy is surprising. The name remains in use today to identify majestic Mount Timpanogos, overlooking Utah Lake and Valley, and in Timpanogos Cave National Monument located on its northern slope.

Dominguez and Escalante also applied the name Timpanogos to Utah Lake, which they discovered. The Indians of the same name living about the lake told the explorers that its waters communicated with an "extremely salty" lake to the north. The explorers did not visit Great Salt Lake, but Miera put it on his maps seemingly as an arm of Lake Timpanogos extending some distance above forty-two degrees (a very considerable error), so it does not appear on the Humboldt maps, which do not reach above that latitude. But Humboldt casts doubt upon the size of the portion of the lake which he does show by the word "douteux," the omission of water lines, and reference to Escalante's journal.

The little stream Rio Yampancas flowing into Lac de Timpanogos from the west is probably identical with the Rio de los Yamparicas (Humboldt's Indiens Yamparicas is the same word) which Miera on some of his maps causes to enter the lake from the east above forty-two degrees of latitude. The Yampa River, which enters the Green River in Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument, and the Yampa Plateau may be historic vestiges of this stream and name.

Just south of Lac de Timpanogos the massive Mount Nebo is shown on the Humboldt map as another Montagnes de Sel Gemme, or Mountains of Rock Salt. Miera places hills of salt on some of his maps in the locality adjacent to the Valle de Salinas where, Escalante notes in his diary, the Indians living about Utah Lake came to obtain their supplies of salt. The stream today known as Salt Creek, which drains the southern slopes of Mount Nebo and debouches in Juab Valley at Nephi, is thought to be the Valle de Salinas of the Spaniards.7 The Franciscan fathers, Dominguez and Escalante, together with their colleague, Francisco Garces, were the discoverers of the Great Basin. Yet in their extensive pioneer explorations of it in 1776 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Garces crossed the Mojave Desert only months before Dominguez and Escalante traversed its eastern edge â&#x20AC;&#x201D; they were altogether unaware that they were in an interior basin with no outlet to the sea. Quite the opposite. Garces in California, after crossing the Mojave Desert, concluded that the rivers he found in the southern Sierra Nevada headed back in the Rocky Mountains, and Dominguez, Escalante, and Miera imagined that the streams originating in the Rockies, or Sierra de las Grullas, flowed westward to reach the Pacific, an idea accepted by Humboldt,

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who adopted Miera's illustration of it from the sources he used to construct his map. This is again the Rio de S. Buenaventura, in reality the Green River, which is discharged into the large unnamed lake the western limits of which are indicated as unknown. On the Miera maps this is Lake Miera (or Laguna de Miera); this and Lake Timpanogos were both used by cartographers after Humboldt as sources for several mythical westward-flowing streams which reached the Pacific in various latitudes between the mouths of the Columbia and the Colorado, much to the confusion of explorers who tried to find them.8 Historic Lake Miera, left without name by Humboldt, is Sevier Lake, the salty sink of the Sevier River which heads south on the High Plateaus of Utah near Bryce Canyon National Park and Cedar Breaks National Monument.

The Rio Salado entering an arm of Sevier Lake on the Humboldt map is the way Miera has it on his maps. When the Spanish explorers visited the lake in 1776, they must have found it much larger than it is today, covering most of the flats, now dry, below the town of Delta. The running stream, Rio Salado, or Salt River, is identified with the spring source that today fills Clear Lake, a migratory water fowl refuge.

South of Miera's lake the Plaines (Llanos) de Nuestra Senora de la Luz is the open country south of Milford, appropriately called now the Escalante Valley and the Escalante Desert. Here the Spanish explorers decided to return to New Mexico rather than go on to California as they had intended. They crossed over the rim of the Great Basin and descended Ash Creek along the Hurricane Cliffs until they reached the Virgin River, called by them the Rio Sulfureo, or Sulphurous River, for they discovered or were near the mineralized La Virken Hot Springs at the mouth of Timpoweap Canyon. The Virgin (a later Spanish name â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Virgen) appears as the Rio de las Piramides Sulphureas, a corruption on the Humboldt map of one of the names Miera applied to the Virgin.

But the term Miera most frequently uses is the Rio Sulfureo de los Piramides, or the Sulphurous River of the Pyramids, and from a study of his maps it is clear that the word pyramid is intended to describe the mountainous towers and temples to the east of the trail at this point and to the north of it as they headed back toward New Mexico. This may be regarded as the first description of the intricately carved escarpments peculiar to the southern exposures of the High Plateaus of Utah which find classic expression in Zion National Park and Monument not far from the Spanish Trail of 1776.9 As the Spaniards turned eastward, they skirted the brilliant Vermilion Cliffs, catching views here and there of the terrace of White Cliffs which stand above them, until they reached

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the Colorado River. To the High Plateaus, which they had seen at many points, Miera appears to have given the name Sierra de los Guacaros, a prominent feature on Humboldt's map.

Returning for a moment to the River of the Pyramids: Humboldt in a note in French states that the location of the mouth of the stream is unknown. In a legend to the left of this in French he also notes the existence of a chain of mountains extending toward the west, traversed by the Rio de San Felipe. The San Felipe (Kern River) was one of the discoveries of Francisco Garces in California, who believed that it headed far back in the interior of the continent. This became one of the more durable mythical rivers of the West, in part because of its mention on Humboldt's respected map. Even Miera's Sulphurous River of the Pyramids was caught up in this cartographical fantasy when it was emptied into the Pacific Ocean without first joining the waters of the Colorado.

The explorations ascribed to Pedro Font in the next note below on the Humboldt map refer actually to those of Father Garces in 1776.

After crossing the Mojave Desert and discovering the Mojave River, which he named the Rio de los Martires, as Humboldt has it (though flowing the wrong way!), he crossed the Colorado River and made a pioneer traverse eastward to Oraibi in the Hopi country. Father Pedro Font made the maps incorporating his discoveries, and these were used

by Humboldt.10 There is nothing on Humboldt's map to show where the Dominguez-Escalante expedition crossed the Colorado River on its way back to Santa Fe. This was at a point in Glen Canyon, which the Spaniards discovered, later known as El Vado de los Padres and now as the Crossing of the Fathers, a few miles upstream from the Glen Canyon damsite. On Humboldt's map this is just below the junction of the Rio Nabajoa and the Rio Zaguanganas, a corruption of Miera's Zaguaganas (Escalante's Sabuaganas), the name of the Indians upstream where the Spaniards crossed the Colorado (San Rafael) on the outgoing trip.

The only landmark in the area noted by Humboldt is El Rastrillo, a misspelling of El Castillo, Miera's name for one of the castle-like monuments east of Glen Canyon Dam, possibly Leche-e Rock, perhaps White Mesa, or Preston Mesa. The Puerto de Bucarelli nearby is Garces' name for the lower course of the Rio faquesila, now the Little Colorado River.

When Dominguez, Escalante, Miera, and company reached the Hopi town Oraibi (Humboldt's Oraybe), they were on familiar ground again, and they soon arrived at Santa Fe, the point of beginning. In the field

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six months, they discovered much new territory which became known to the world when Humboldt published his "Carte Generate" in 1811.

Not the least valuable feature of the map is the location of many of the campsites named by the Dominguez-Escalante expedition; if a line is drawn counterclockwise around the map connecting places identified by the small circular dot (S. Rustico, Valli de S. Jose, etc.), the route followed by the explorers through Utah may be located approximately.

The expedition by reference to "Pere Escalante" is mentioned three times on the face of the map and a number of times in the text of the Political Essay. The one legend where the name is given as ". . . Pere Antonio Velez y Escalante . . . ," followed by the erroneous date 1777, is a curious mixture of the names of Dominguez and Escalante, and it belies Humboldt's indebtedness to the manuscript maps drawn by Costanso and Mascaro.11 Indian tribes are located by Humboldt; those in the Utah region he has quite probably adopted from the Mascaro-Costanso sources, though he has not reproduced the tribal boundaries found in their work and in the maps of Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, the original source.

The Aztec Indians who left their homeland Aztldn in 1160, Humboldt suggests, may have traveled across Utah in their wanderings, passing Utah Lake, which he says might be Lake Teguayo, en route to the San Juan River, where they remained for a time before going on to the Gila River in Arizona. This startling information is carried in the legend in French to the left of Lac de Timpanogos, in one immediately below the Rio Nabajoa, and in another just below the Casas Grandes in Arizona.12 Hypothesis to Humboldt was fact to another. The word Teguayo, a product of the fertile seventeenth-century-Spanish imagination, identified a fabulous land northwest of New Mexico. This was a legend contradicted in fact by the Dominguez-Escalante expedition, but it was revived by the weight of Humboldt's words alone. Lake Teguayo blossomed out again on the maps after 1811, competing with Timpanogos as the name for Great Salt Lake, or Utah Lake, or it was applied to Sevier Lake, which had been left blank by Humboldt. It was not crowded off the map altogether until some time after the Mormons arrived in Utah in 1847.13 The Aztecs and Montezuma are still here. It was easy after the middle of the nineteenth century, once the numerous ruins left by ancient peoples in Utah and the Southwest became better known, to conclude that Humboldt's hypothesis was right: they had passed this way.14 Two frequently encountered names in the Southwest today are

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Aztec and Montezuma. Utah has at least one of each. Montezuma Creek, a fork of the San Juan River, drains the slopes of the Abajo (Blue) Mountains, and Aztec Creek, which receives the waters that flow under Rainbow Natural Bridge, are both where Humboldt notes that tradition, however uncertain, accounts for one of the stopping places of the Aztecs in their migrations.

Alexander von Humboldt, then, literally put Utah on the map. The Political Essay was accepted at once, even before it was published, as the word of authority, and it remained so for some time after the mountain men and later explorers corrected the geographical errors.15 Humboldt revealed the land, he told what was known about it, and he prophesied what might become of it. At a time when men were probing for water routes across the continent, and before Lewis and Clark published their report, Humboldt suggested the feasibility of commercial communication between the Rio Grande and the Colorado. But, he said, the Rio Zaguanganas and Rio Grande "can never be interesting for commerce, till great changes . . . introduce colonization into their fertile and temperate regions," and as he observed the rapid advance of the Americans into the Mississippi Basin, he concluded that "these changes are perhaps not very distant." 16 As much as any other, John Charles Fremont personifies the American advance and the searcher for first the water and then the railroad routes to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific. And Fremont recognized and acknowledged his debt to Humboldt by frequent reference to him in his published works and by naming after him the Humboldt River and the mountains in which it heads.17 But these were lost to Nevada in 1861 and in 1864 and 1866 when the-territory was first divided and then reduced, and one studies the map in vain- today to find a place in Utah commemorative of the man who first publicized some of its many wonders.18 NOTES 1

The original English edition, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Containing Researches Relative to the Geography of Mexico, the Extent of its Surface and its Political Division into Intendancies, the Physical Aspect of the Country, the Population, the State of Agriculture and Manufacturing and Commercial Industry, the Canals Projected Between the South Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the Crown Revenues, the Quantity of Precious Metals which have Flowed from Mexico into Europe and Asia, since the Discovery of the New Continent, and the Military Defence of New Spain. With Physical Sections and Maps, founded on Astronomical Observations, and Trigonometrical and Barometrical Measurements. Translated from the original French by John Black (4 vols., London, 1811), has been used primarily in the preparation of this article. The original French edition appeared in die series of quarto volumes written by Humboldt and Aime Bonpland, Essai Politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne (2 vols., Paris, 1811), and this was accompanied by the atlas in folio, Atlas geographique et physique du Royaume de la

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Nouvelle-Espagne, fonde sur des observations astronomiques, des mesures trigonometriques et des nivellemens barometriques (Paris, 1811); another (Paris, 1812). An octavo edition of the Essai in five volumes was also published in Paris in 1811, and a second edition was published there, 1825-1827, in four volumes. The most recent edition is the sixth in Spanish, edited by Vito Alessio Robles, Ensayo politico sobre el Reino de la Nueva Espana . . (4 vols., Mexico, 1941), and an atlas. All who work widi Humboldt soon discover the need for an exhaustive study of his immense bibliography. A recent biographer is Helmut de Terra, Humboldt, the Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859 (New York, 1955).

2 The map bears the title, "Carte Generale du Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne depuis le parallele de 16° jusqu'au parallele de 38° (latitude Nord) dressee sur les observations astronomiques et sur l'ensemble des materiaux qui existoient a Mexico, au commencement de l'annee 1804." This is the map that was drawn up in preliminary form by Humboldt in Mexico in 1804 and completed by him and by Friesen, Oltmanns, and Thulier in 1809. Another general map, "Carte du Mexique et des pays limitrophes situes au nord et a Test . . ." was adopted from the above and from otiier materials by J. B. Poirson, but it lacks the detail of the first for the Rocky Mountain region. Both maps appeared, the first in two sections, in the editions of the Atlas geographique; owing to its smaller size the "Carte du Mexique . . ." is frequently found in the several editions of the essay with a title translated to match the language of the edition. The northwestern portion of this map has been reproduced, plate 30 (B) in, Charles O. Paullin, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, John K. Wright, ed. (Washington and New York, 1932). The northern half of the "Carte Generale . . ." has been reproduced by Carl I. Wheat, 1540-1861 Mapping the Transmississippi West, Volume One, The Spanish Entrada to the Louisiana Purchase, 1540-1804 (San Francisco, 1957), as his no. 272, opposite page 134. Wheat's monumental work under this title is scheduled to run to five volumes.

3 The maps drawn by Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco have been brought out in published form only in recent years. One appears in the article with the misleading title by J. Cecil Alter, "Father Escalante's Map," Utah Historical Quarterly, IX (January, April, 1941), 64-72. This is followed by two articles by Herbert S. Auerbach which are helpful in squaring the discoveries of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition and the maps made by Miera with modern geography: "Father Escalante's Route (As depicted by the Map of Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco)," and, "Father Escalante's Itinerary," ibid., 73-80; (July, October), 109-28. Auerbach's edition of the journal and itinerary of the DominguezEscalante expedition, "Father Escalante's Journal with Related Documents and Maps," ibid., XI (1943), has two additional maps by Miera and several other maps of importance though they are not precisely identified. Another map by Miera, in colors, is found in the journal and itinerary of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition edited by Herbert E. Bolton, Pageant in the Wilderness (Salt Lake City, 1950). Carl I. Wheat, op. cit., devotes his entire chap, vi to the Miera maps of the 1776 Dominguez-Escalante expedition; he describes six distinct manuscript Miera maps in three separate types and reproduces one of the "bearded Indian" maps, a type found also in Auerbach and Bolton.

' One combs the long geographical introduction in vain for any mention of Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, but Humboldt does refer, Vol. I, lxxiv-lxxv, to a "Carte manuscrite de la Nouvelle Espagne, dressee par ordre du vice-roi Buccarelli, par MM. Costanzo et Mascaro," which map served him for the Moqui (Hopi) country and for the Rio Nabajoa (San Juan River) among other places. He refers to another, Vol. I, lxxxiii, "Mapa del Nuevo Mexico," a manuscript map extending from twenty-nine to forty-two degrees of latitude, no author given. This apparently was the source of the Utah material, for he notes that under forty-one degrees this map is minute in detail, particularly with reference to such features as the lake "des Timpanogos," the sources of the "Rio Colorado," and the "Rio del Norte." This latter map has not been identified, but a comparison of Humboldt's "Carte Generale" with maps made by Miguel Costanso and Manuel Agustin Mascaro suggests that he must have also used one of them, or one based upon their work for the Utah portion of the map. Wheat, op. cit., notes four manuscript maps — one by MascaroCostanso, one by Mascaro, and two anonymous, produced between ca. 1779 and 1783. His nos. 181, 182, 193, and 195 bear certain parallel resemblances in the Utah region, and it is this type which Humboldt must have used to portray that area in his "Carte Generale."

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One of these, the following map, or one of its type may have been the source Humboldt cites as the "Carte manuscrite" above: Carta o mapa geografico de una gran parte del Reino de N. E. comprendido entre los 19 y 42 grados de latitud septentrional y entre 249 y 289 grados de longitud del meridiano de Tenerife . . . Construyolo el Ingeniero Don Miguel Costanso y va aumentado en varias noticias que adquirio en sus viages el ingeniero Don Manuel Mascaro. This is no. 702 in, Henry R. Wagner, The Cartography of the Northwest Coast of America (Berkeley, 1937), II, 349, who dates it "1784(?)"; note also his 694, p. 348; see Wheat, no. 182. Whatever source Humboldt used, die genius of Bernardo de Miera shows brightly through as it unmistakably does in Humboldt's own work.

This seems to be the place to mention a map of North America drawn in 1802 by Isidoro de Antillon who published it with an accompaniment of fifty-two pages, Numero V, Carta de la America Septentrional [Madrid, 1803]. Antillon, a professor in Madrid, incorporated Anza, Garces, and Dominguez-Escalante data on his finely-engraved map, and he actually preceded Humboldt in portraying die Utah region as it had been seen by "los PP.s Velez y Escalante." His map is on a smaller scale, however, and it seems to have enjoyed very little use by others, although Humboldt himself acknowledged a limited indebtedness to Antillon, Political Essay, I, lxi. Antillon notes in his accompaniment, 4344, the use of "an anonymous author on a grand scale" for the north central interior, which suggests the Mascaro-Costanso type of map also used by Humboldt. See also note 15 for others who preceded Humboldt by beating him into print with his own material.

5 C. Gregory Crampton, "The Discovery of the Green River," Utah Historical Quarterly, XX (October, 1952), 299-312, discusses the expedition's experiences here in detail. ° An influential example of this treatment is found on the general "Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi to die Pacific Ocean . . . to Accompany the Reports of the Explorations for a Railroad Route . . ." by Lt. G. K. Warren, 1857, in Reports of Explorations and Surveys to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean (Washington, 1861), XI. 1 Utah's colorful nomenclature deserves more study. The use of the words Nebo, Juab, Nephi, Salinas, and Salt, all in one sentence above suggests the rich potentialities. s The place of Utah's lakes and rivers in the historical cartography of the West has been examined by C. Gregory Crampton and Gloria G. Griffen, "The San Buenaventura, Mythical River of the West," Pacific Historical Review, XXV (May, 1956), 163-71.

0 George C. Fraser reproduces a portion of a Miera map in an article, "El Vado de los Padres, die Story of the Old Ute Ford of the Colorado River, Crossed in 1776 by the Spanish Fadiers, Escalante and Dominguez, and nearly a Century Later by the Mormon Pioneer, Hamblin; Long a Route of Marauding Indians," Natural History, XXIII (July-August, 1923), 344-57. He identifies Miera's "pyramids" with the Temples of the Virgin at the entrance to Zion National Park.

10 See Crampton and Griffen, op. cit., 165. " T h e date 1777, which appears on Humboldt's map, could not be included in the part reproduced here. Wagner's map no. 702 (see note 4), and possibly others of this type, bear die date 1777 for the expedition. Reference is made by Humboldt, Political Essay, I, 22, to "Father Escalante and Father Antonio Velez." (Italics his.) Other references to Escalante: II, 336, 382. '"' In the text of the Essay, II, 303, Humboldt notes diat it is only "Very vague supposition" that the Aztecs traveled this route; he notes here that the three stations in the migration were Lake Teguayo, the Rio Gila, and Yanos, which is at variance with the information carried on the face of the "Carte Generale." But again in the text, II, 315, he reports Indian tradition as saying that twenty miles north of the Moqui (Hopi) villages, and near the mouth of die Rio Zaguanganas, was the place where the Aztecs first established themselves after departure from Aztldn. See also his note, page 324, where identification of Lake Teguayo with Lake Timpanogos is suggested. Humboldt's information about the migrations of the Aztecs comes from die work by Francisco Javier Clavigero, Storia antica del Messico (4 vols., Cesena, 1780-1781); an English edition translated from the Italian by Charles Cullen, The History of Mexico Collected from Spanish and Mexican Historians . . . (2 vols., London, 1787). See particularly Humboldt's chap, vi, Book II, Vol. II. The material on the migrations of the Aztecs is in Book II in Clavigero. Another

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source was the engraved map by Josef Antonio de Alzate y Ramirez, Nuevo Mapa geografico de la America Septentional, perteneciente al Virreynato de Mexico: dedicado a los sabios miembros de la Academia Real de las Ciencias de Paris . . . (Paris, 1768), which Humboldt, Essay, I, lxxv, attributes to Siguenza. This has the "Laguna de Teguyo" at forty-one degrees with a note that the Mexicans (Aztecs) left there to found their empire.

13 S. Lyman Tyler, " T h e Myth of the Lake of Copala and Land of Teguayo," Utah Historical Quarterly, XX (October, 1952), 313-29, has examined the history of a durable myth. George P. H a m m o n d , "The Search for the Fabulous in the Settlement of the Southwest," ibid., XXIV (January, 1956), 1-19, places the myth in broad perspective.

" Josiah Gregg in his classic Commerce of the Prairies . . . (New York, 1844) (see the fine edition edited by Max L. Moorehead [Norman, Oklahoma, 1954]), chap, xv, suggests an Aztec origin for die ruined towns such as Pueblo Bonito. He cites Clavigero and Humboldt. Humboldt himself repeated the assertion of the Aztec migrations and their stops at Teguayo and the Rio Gila in his Views of Nature or Contemplations on the Sublime Phenomena of Creation with Scientific Illustrations . . Translated from the German

by E. C. Otte and Henry G. Bohn (London, 1850), 207. Here are some later writers who identify the Aztecs with various Indians, ancient and living, in the Southwest: William A. Bell, New Tracks in North America . . . (2nd ed., London, 1870), chap, iii, Part III, "The Aztec Ruins of New Mexico and Arizona"; J. H. Beadle, Western Wilds and the Men who Redeem Them . . . (San Francisco, 1881), chap, xvii, "Among the Aztecs in Arizona."

15 Others published die essential material appearing on his "Carte Generale" before Humboldt himself. T h e preliminary draft of the map which he had left in Washington supplied much of the data appearing on Zebulon Montgomery Pike's "Map of die Internal Provinces of New Spain," accompanying the narrative of his western travels which appeared in the first edition in 1810. T h e standard scholarly edition of Pike is by Elliott Coues, The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike (3 vols., New York, 1895). Coues says in his Introduction, I, xxxv-xxxvi, that Pike simply used Humboldt's maps without acknowledgment. T h e Pike map in the Utah region pretty closely follows Humboldt, but there are some differences. One is that Alzate's chart is referred to as one of the sources of information for the identification of Lake Timpanogos with Lake Teguayo of the Aztecs. Another who beat Humboldt to print with his own map was the English cartographer Aaron Arrowsmith, who published "A N e w Map of Mexico and Adjacent Provinces Compiled from Original Documents" at London in 1810. Humboldt had sent Arrowsmith a copy of his map, in what must have been its last revision, for the English production is closer to the original than Pike's. Humboldt publicly chastised Pike and Arrowsmith in his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799-1804, Translated into English by Helen Maria Williams (London, 1814), I, xxix-xxx.

16 Political Essay, I, 71-72, 274; II, 278. The map reproduced in this article showing the projected communication between the Rio Grande and the Colorado River is one of eight such maps in illustration of as many routes appearing in Atlas geographique et physique du Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne . . . (Paris, 1811), 4.

17 In his important Geographical Memoir upon Upper California, in Illustration of his Map of Oregon and California (Senate Miscellaneous Document No. 148, 30 Cong., 1 sess.)

(Washington, 1848) which finally defined the Great Basin, Fremont pays frequent tribute to Humboldt, and on page 10 he records the renaming of the Humboldt River in respect to one " w h o has done so much to illustrate North American geography. . . ." In his later works H u m b o l d t expressed appreciation for the results of Fremont's scientific explorations in the West: Views of Nature . . . (London, 1850), 29, 32, 33-34, 37, and particularly in his Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (New York, 1859), V, 383-86. T h e latter passage is quoted by Fremont in his Memoirs of my Life . . . (Chicago and N e w York, 1887), I, 605-06.

18 As originally constituted the territory of Utah included the entire watershed of the Humboldt River, but the creation of the territory of Nevada in 1861 and the subsequent reduction of the western boundary of Utah in 1864 and 1866 left the drainage, as well as the mountains entirely in Nevada.

Artist's conception of the Old Stagecoach Inn at Fairfield as it will appear after extensive refurbishing. Once an Overland Stage and Pony Express station, it will serve as a museum for relics of the era.

Drawing courtesy State Parks Commission.

A N E W LOOK

AT OLD T R E A S U R E S

By Jacf\ Goodman

In 1858 one Nephi Johnson, prospecting in southern Utah for soil in which cotton might grow, stumbled upon the tangle of chasms, canyons, and truncated mountains we now know as Zion National Park. Mr. Johnson, ignoring the setting in which he found himself, reported only that growing cotton in the canyon bottoms would be impractical â&#x20AC;&#x201D; thereby reflecting the sentiments of pioneers who came, saw, and departed in later days.

Apocryphal or not, it is likewise said that Ebenezer Bryce, discoverer of another slice of spectacular parkland now bearing his name, gazed upon the minarets and crenellated turrets of the regions, and opined: "It's a helluva place to lose a cow."

Not till city-dwelling enthusiasts of a later era, many of them outlanders, hurrahed loudly about Utah's scenery were the state's initial national parks and national monuments established. There is precedent for this, to be sure: It is correctly pointed out that few Utah farmers or ranchers gaze across their acres at the Wasatch or the La Sals and exclaim about the beauties of peaks outside their dooryards. Visiting aestheticians scornfully note that few Utah residences are so sited as to take picture-window advantage of available views. But how many New Yorkers crossing the East River bridges by rapid transit train look up from their newspapers to enjoy the striking sights of the Manhattan

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skyline? How many San Francisco residents take time to climb Coit Tower for a panoramic inspection of their harbor ?

Admittedly the Utah situation permits some moralizing about the fact that, whereas far fields seem greenest, objects close at hand are ignored. Utah natives, while dutifully marking, labeling, and cataloguing historic sites and homes visited or inhabited by Mormon pioneers, have done little to record or report the visual scenes or, more important, to preserve the setting involved. Captain Miera y Pacheco, mapmaker with the Escalante party in 1776, left us the first description of Utah Valley, labeling it "the most pleasing, beautiful, and fertile site in all New Spain"; Solomon Nunes Carvalho, artist with the Fremont expedition of 1854, has left us the first really competent sketches of the region. But settlers, understandably busy wresting a living from the soil, rearing families, and building a way of life, paid comparatively scant attention to the aesthetic and recreational aspects of a land they were seeking to tame.

After all, a man sweating in an effort to make the desert blossom as the rose is not too likely to muse upon the manner in which the hot sun is tinting distant peaks. He may think wayfaring strangers a bit daft if they comment on the hues of desert varnish visible in the slickrock country down the road. Indeed, he may think a group seeking to set aside a piece of untamed landscape for perpetual contemplation is more than a little zany. The notion that travelers may pay more in good hard cash to be permitted to gaze upon some scenery than that very scenery is worth as rangeland, timberland, or as a mining prospect is therefore late in penetrating Utah and the consciousness of some of its residents.

After all, much of the state was labeled the center of the "Great American Desert" by cartographers little more dian a century ago. This, perhaps, is why Utah, rich in scenery, is short on tourists. This, perhaps, explains a philosophy which permitted the commonwealth to lag so far behind it has only now become the final state in die union to establish a State Park and Recreation Commission. This belated action might indeed be a turning point of history-making proportions regarding Utah's heritage. The act of the 1957 legislature creating the Park Commission, and thereby opening up the way to establishment of a State Park System, may one day be remembered as the major accomplishment of that law-making session.

Granted an initial operating budget of just $25,000 a year â&#x20AC;&#x201D; smaller than the sum spent for lawn maintenance in some city park systems â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

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Utah's Commission has nevertheless set to work in vigorous style, using persuasive eloquence to obtain sizeable favors from agencies and organizations equally eager to foster park progress. As a result the National Park Service has donated the talents of an expert park planner for a period of months; the director of the NPS Mission 66 has carefully surveyed the state's park potential; another NPS expert crisscrossed the Wasatch in midwinter to prepare sketches of available recreational areas.

Meanwhile the state of California has made a planner-consultant available on a part-time basis; one of the nation's largest construction firms has donated maps and engineering aid; the National Guard is aiding through survey flights and road-building chores; the State Highway Commission, the State Historical Society, and the Tourist and Publicity Council are providing invaluable assistance.

Indicative of the impetus behind Utah's new State Park campaign, the Rockefeller family, through the conservation-minded Jackson Hole Preserve, Incorporated, has donated $20,000 to the Park Commission, thereby nearly matching the initial legislative appropriation. As if moved by this practical expression of out-of-state aid, a rather less wealthy Utah family, comprising descendants of pioneer John Carson, donated the old Carson Pony Express and stage station at Fairfield to the Park Commission for museum purposesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;-and other gifts seem likely to follow.

As the only gift of its kind ever made by Jackson Hole Preserve to any state park commission, the grant from the organization headed by Laurance S. Rockefeller is worth more than a little attention. It is specifically intended "to encourage the launching of planning and development of Utah areas of scenic beauty, recreational utility and historic interest," as Mr. Rockefeller declared in a letter to Governor George Dewey Clyde which accompanied the gift.

In making the grant public, the nonprofit Rockefeller agency, which conducts activities in the fields of conservation and recreation, made clear the $20,000 gift "is intended as seed money to encourage other gifts." In the wake of this grant, park-planning activities of the Utah Commission are being closely watched within the state and outside its borders by members of conservation groups, by federal and state officials, and by westerners who hold high hopes that a multipleuse program can be developed permitting recreational use of forest and canyon lands side by side with other economically necessary land uses, including grazing, oil and minerals development. In most regions of the West, such multiple use has seemed impossible to accomplish, mak-

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ing modern history replete with wordy battles between conservationists, water-users, hydroelectric-power proponents, excitable stockmen, lovers of unspoiled scenery, lumbermen, and mine operators.

Formulas to prevent such clashes are historically hard to come by.

However, virtually-all the scenic areas Utah's park advocates must turn to in the search for recreational preserves are already being probed for uranium and oil, used for grazing, or utilized as watersheds. Thus a multi-use policy is a necessity â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the more so since most Utahns have yet to fully appreciate the dollar value of tourism.

Largely responsible for the current long and thoughtful look Utah is according the recreational use and conservation of much of the West's finest mountain and desert scenery is Harold P. Fabian, a retired Salt Lake City attorney serving as nonsalaried chairman of the new State Park Commission. Widely known in the East as well as the Mountain West for his continuing efforts to protect the Jackson Hole country from despoilment, Fabian was attorney for John D. Rockefeller, Jr., during the philanthropist's long-range purchase of some 36,000 acres of Wyoming land â&#x20AC;&#x201D; acreage dioughtfully presented to the federal government for establishment of Grand Teton National Park.

A long-time friend and co-worker of former National Park Service director Horace Albright and of such potent conservationists as New York publisher Alfred Knopf, Fabian is essentially a practical enthusiast.

Stated differently, he is willing to establish a lodge or campgrounds within a park preserve, if doing so will increase recreational use of the area in question, and if such a project can be carried through without despoiling scenic values. He is quite willing to live side by side with oil and mineral developments, especially those of the taxpaying variety.

As a result, Utah's first State Park chairman has proved especially apt in luring busy businessmen, ranchers, foresters, architects, engineers, and the like to positions on high-caliber, hard-working committes, survey teams, and regional study groups.

Heading the fledgling state park system's tiny paid staff is Chester J. Olsen, a retired regional supervisor of the United States Forest Service, wise in the ways of a West in which the usage of forested lands and water has frequently been the subject of heated debate, court action, or even gunplay.

Working at a speed and on a scale larger governmental agencies might envy, Fabian and Olsen have a dozen sizeable tasks under way.

First among these is an over-all study of the recreational potential and improved usage of the Alta-Brighton-Park City-Heber-Provo area

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Skiing at Alta in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Alta, scene of early mining activities, is now a mecca for skiers.

PHOTOS H A L R U M E L

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of the Wasatch Range, directly east of the state's major population center. Already heavily utilized for winter skiing, summer camping, hiking, and fishing, the area contains Forest Service lands, Timpanogos Cave National Monument, some state acreage, an increasing number of private cabins, major city watershed areas, and a welter of mining claims including a few operating mines, abandoned diggings, and a semi-ghost town.

The scope of the State Park Commission's problems becomes easily apparent with realization that committees, sports associations, municipal engineers, and survey groups have vainly sought for a dozen years to solve the clash of interest between embattled winter sportsmen and ski lodge operators on the one hand and the Salt Lake City Water Department plus the U.S. Public Health Service on the other. There is an apparent possibility of a solution under State Park auspices in the offing, however. Since increasingly heavy use at winter sports areas and summer campsites essentially poses the threat to city water safety, easing such pressure by developing new areas off the watershed could be the answer.

Which is why plans are already drawn for lodges, campsites, and ski lifts on the eastern slope of the Wasatch in the Heber Valley and Park City area drainage. Accessible to Salt Lakers and out-of-state visitors alike, these recreational developments could bring new revenue to an area sadly hurt by mine shutdowns and lowered farm incomes, while giving more lebensraum for winter and summer recreation seekers.

Since the state agency has no architect or draftsmen, specialists thoughtfully provided by the National Park Service have drawn the plans.

Private capital is already more than a little interested in the area's recreational potential. Members of a Park City mining family hope to start construction on a sizeable chair lift in the mountains back of Snyderville sometime before 1959, while residents of Heber and Salt Lake City are studying the resort potential of the Bonanza Flats section across the divide from Brighton.

An all-out analysis of Utah's best-known but least developed attraction, the Great Salt Lake, is another immediate objective of the Park Commission. Two uninviting beaches, an inadequately maintained county boat harbor, and half-century old Saltair are the sole facilities accessible to present-day tourists or residents along the lakeshore. Sewage is turning the seventy-five-mile-long lake into a brackish septic tank; smelters do little to enhance the setting; and receding water levels add to the problems vexing anyone eyeing the lake for recreational purposes.

N E W LOOK AT OLD TREASURES

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Fabian has persuaded the engineering-construction firm of Morrison-Knudsen to contribute time, effort, maps, and know-how to an analysis bearing on the long-time dream of an Antelope Island causeway. The privately owned island has the lake's best beach, plus a spring believed capable of providing fresh water for a sizeable resort. M & K engineers, currently building a twelve-mile Soudiern Pacific Railroad fill across the saline sea, have an on-the-spot knowledge of the lake's behavior, plus all manner of equipment which could be employed for causeway and beach building in 1960.

Simultaneously, the commission has been carefully blueprinting a tidy, useful, but far less expensive beach project which could be speedily built in the neighborhood of present Black Rock and Sunset beaches, if the legislature makes funds available. Such a public spa, providing good parking adjacent to U.S. 40,shaded walks and picnic areas,modern bathhouses and tidy showers, would at least be a place to which we could invite tourists without shaming the state. Meanwhile, illustrating the co-operation engendered with other state agencies, senior students at the University of Utah's School of Architecture have been busily completing carefully detailed plans for a resort on mountainous, fourteen-mile-long Antelope Island.

Desert regions, as well as mountain and lake country, are all being carefully eyed and catalogued with a view toward immediate or longrange recreational development. To accomplish this objective while lacking a sizeable staff, the Utah State Park Commission turned to county commissions in each of the state's twenty-nine subdivisions, and has developed a catalogue of thirty-nine large and small areas of a caliber calculated to excite knowing sportsmen, photographers, conservationists, or even officials from other states. An Oklahoma expert, taken on a quick tour of the Wasatch, reported, "If we had one little slice of these mountains in our state park system, we would be advertising nationwide and fending off the crowds."

Down Moab way in the oil-rich, uranium-producing desert country virtually across the road from Arches National Monument, spectacular Dead Horse Point, Grand View Point, and Upheaval Dome â&#x20AC;&#x201D; all adjacent to the confluence of the Colorado and Green rivers â&#x20AC;&#x201D; are rated as national-monument or even national-park caliber by federal officials and by the comparatively few vacationists who have traveled the unpaved roads of the area. The National Park Service admittedly has all it can do, even with Mission 66 funds, to maintain and improve existing recreational lands under its own jurisdiction, let alone acquire more. There-

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L O O K AT OLD T R E A S U R E S

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fore, some federal officials have let it be known they would not be averse to turning the Dead Horse Point plateau and adjoining areas, now used as grazing lands under the Bureau of Land Management, over to the state when and if the Park Commission feels able to build and operate proper facilities at the overlook far above the converging rivers.

Several operating uranium mines lie below rimrock near the viewpoints, while oil wells are already "on pump" on the mesa tops. Planning a national park in the area would instantly touch off an uproar between dedicated conservationists of the "don't touch a blade of grass" variety and equally single-minded business interests. Under the multiple-use provisions of the State Park Commission, controlled use of the Dead Horse area lands for minerals development, petroleum output, grazing, and recreation would appear possible. Meanwhile, the National Park Service has informally agreed to pass its plans for a Dead Horse Point development to Messrs. Fabian and Olsen, whenever they obtain sufficient legislative appropriations to make the dirt fly.

With funds presently in hand, the commission has taken over administration of one of Utah's major tourist attractions, the "This Is The Place Monument" designed by the late Mahonri Young, overlooking the Salt Lake Valley. Visited by thousands annually, this monumental group of bronzes honoring Mormon pioneers, trappers, Catholic missionaries, and early explorers was erected near U.S. 40 at the Emigration Canyon entry to the valley in 1947 to mark Utah's centennial. Unfortunately the monument builders failed to provide properly located parking areas, landscaping, rest rooms, or educative facilities. Now a handsome but simple structure, carefully "fitted" into a hillside site, has been built to serve the latter two functions. Rehabilitation of parking areas and extensive landscaping are the next steps contemplated.

The new commission has likewise been given jurisdiction over Utah's first capitol, a modest red sandstone structure at Fillmore on busy U.S. 91, and hopes to operate it as an attractive museum specializing in memorabilia of territorial days. At Fairfield, some forty miles south of Salt Lake City via the Redwood Road highway and a dozen miles west of Lehi, the century old Carson Hotel, one of the West's few remaining Pony Express and Overland Stage stations, has been given the commission by descendants of its builder. Scene of an Indian fracas, intimately bound up with the colorful history of Camp Floyd, the hotel is in sad disrepair and needs a complete refurbishing. It is, however, admirably suited to serve as a modest museum housing relics of the

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"Mormon War" of 1857-58 and of Pony Express and stagecoach days â&#x20AC;&#x201D; all readily available â&#x20AC;&#x201D; plus objects and artifacts bearing on Indian cultures of the Utah Lake area.

Linked to its functions in the museum field, the commission is charged with preservation from destruction, vandalism, or downright thievery of the countless otherwise unprotected pithouses, cliff dwellings, Moqi houses, petroglyphs, and geological oddities dotting the state.

"Sportsmen" have taken potshots at and badly marred many cliffside paintings and petroglyphs; the spectacular "Goblet of Venus" formation was destroyed by prankish sightseers; petrified wood from Utah's southern deserts has been hauled from the state by the truckload, while unskilled if well-meaning "pot hunters" have made off with arrow points, pottery shards, and similar Indian artifacts with impunity. Parks Director Olsen, in an effort to end such vandalism, has thoughtfully deputized a force of some three hundred Utahns, all of them members of law enforcement agencies, federal units, or state departments, experienced in problems concerning law and order.

Another initial task on which the Park Commission has centered attention is the operation of facilities at Rockport Lake which may prove a model for future and parallel activities. Summit County officials, at a loss in handling crowds which swarmed to the new reservoir in 1957, quickly turned to the state for aid. The lake, formed by the new Bureau of Reclamation dam at Wanship on the Weber River, has proved a prime attraction for anglers and water skiers, with boat launching, dockage, sanitary, and picnic facilities being built. Park Commission co-operation with the State Fish and Game Department, the Tourist and Publicity agency, and the Highway Commission, State Water and Power Board, and other dissimilar agencies is expected to lead to practical low-budget operation of the area and others like it. Boating enthusiasts have urged a single fee policy of licensing small craft for use on all the state's waters, and the operations at Rockport will doubtless furnish cost-and-use studies valuable in the statewide boating program and the providing of lakeside facilities.

Among other areas eyed as potential state park sites are the Great Goosenecks of the San Juan, where the meandering stream has cut a weird pattern across the southeastern Utah desert; historic Hole-in-theRock on the Colorado, where wagon train pioneers lowered wagons and teams to the river's edge by hewing a route across slick rock in one of the West's most recent sagas; a sizeable chunk of the inaccessible, snowtipped Henry Mountains, as rich in deer and wildlife as in scenery; and

NEW LOOK AT OLD TREASURES

293

such aptly named but seldom visited desert areas as Goblin Valley, The Needles, Castle Valley, and Grand Gulch, all comparing favorably in scenic interest with such "federalized" areas as Cedar Breaks National Monument or Bryce Canyon National Park.

The thirty-nine areas of scenic and historic interest State Park and Recreation Commission officials deem most likely for development are scattered across Utah's 84,990 square miles at elevations ranging from 2,800 feet in the desert country to upwards of 11,000 feet in a trio of mountain ranges. Picnicking and camping, boating, swimming, skiing, riding, hiking, and just plain loafing will be made more readily accessible to residents of every Utah area, and tourism given a major boost â&#x20AC;&#x201D; if and when the program now taking shape moves out of the blueprint stage.

In establishing its State Park Commission at long last, Utah's legislature showed awareness of the "has not" status of the Beehive State as regards tourist trade. Between 3,000,000 and 3,500,000 tourists were reported visiting Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming in 1956. However, tourists spent $160,000,000 in Wyoming, $308,000,000 in Colorado, and just $97,000,000 in Utah in the same twelve months. Lack of resort facilities, lack of access roads, lack of "tourist business know-how" are among reasons given for the contrasting figures.

It cannot be denied Utah has failed to cater to tourist needs. The state contains not a single major modern resort by eastern or California standards, except for those in two national parks; its ski lodges no longer compare well with those in such competing areas as Aspen, Colorado; there are no dude ranches comparable to those found in Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, or Arizona; no children's camps of the sort so prevalent in other regions.

All this will be corrected, if Park Commission Chairman Fabian proves an apt seer. An ardent conservationist and scenery-lover, he firmly feels more and more family-style vacationists, folks who love the outdoors but "want to see it in comfort," will be swarming to Utah and the West in future years. Says Fabian: People are living longer and retiring in greater numbers â&#x20AC;&#x201D; as witness myself. The national population is growing with tremendous speed; the increase of leisure, along with the ease of travel, is placing a tremendous burden on national parks.

The Utah park sites we are studying are, in many cases, on routes leading to the national parks, and so we hope to take some strain off these overburdened areas. In addition, by pro-

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viding state facilities, we will drain some of our own Utah people from the crowds burdening national park and national forest lands.

Admittedly we are behind the times. Look at the Great Salt Lake â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a tourist attraction of prime importance, lined with dead shrimp and filled with the sewage of our cities, a criminal waste of a fine resource. But we are beginning to learn that for each dollar spent on a state-built recreation area, the economy of the state will gain ten dollars in tourist revenues. And simultaneously we Utahns get the free dividends of recreational areas for ourselves.

On February 13, 1958, Conrad L. Wirth, director of the National Park Service, wrote the Utah State Park Commission as follows concerning some of the survey work mentioned earlier: It seems to me almost providential that the people of your state have on hand and at such a strategic location, an area with the great potential (of the Alta-Brighton-Heber triangle) for a diversified, year-round park and recreation program at the crossroads of western tourist travel....

There are doubtless many problems to be faced by the commission in launching its program. Whatever you are able to accomplish now is a lasting investment in the future of Utah, and in the welfare of its present and future citizens. Being familiar with the problems faced by the states in this field, I hope you will consider seriously the "high cost of waiting" and take bold, forward looking steps on acquisition of necessary lands before spiraling property values or other uses of the lands make them unattainable....

On January 29, in accepting the gift of the old Stagecoach Inn at Fairfield from members of the Carson family, Governor George Dewey Clyde remarked: Your gift, in effect, reminds each of us of Utah's precious heritage. You are reminding us, I think, that we have a duty to the past, as well as the present and the future. The State Park Commission is fulfilling part of its duty to the present and future by seeking out beautiful sites, recreation areas, which feature fine lakes and colorful canyons.

You . . . are reminding us of the history which is so recent, but fading so fast. Our children read of the days of the Mormon pioneers, read of the Pony Express, of the Overland Stage,

NEW LOOK AT OLD TREASURES

295

of Johnston's Army â&#x20AC;&#x201D; they read, but like us, tend to forget.

They see Pony Express riders on television or in the movies, and do not realize this history was written right outside their dooryards, right down the road. History has become to them something abstract, distant. . . .

See, in mind's eye, what the old Stagecoach Inn will mean to present day residents of Utah County and the entire state who have a tendency to forget the past. School children of another generation will come trooping in with their teachers and parents, and will say: "This is how it was, how it really was, not in the days of'movie camera or television writers, but in the days when 'Pony Express riders galloped in from Sacramento with the mail. Here is the place the Overland Stage really stopped, with horse lathered, after a 45-mile run from Salt Lake."

Looking across the old Camp Floyd, or past the willows to the old Fairfield cemetery, perhaps a few more of our children and grandchildren will realize what life was like in a fading era. . . . Learning that George and Washington Carson were killed at Fairfield by Indians, perhaps a few more of our descendants will realize life was grim, real, and earnest, and that this land where they live had to be fought for, cleared, irrigated, colonized.

To Governor Clyde and thoughtful Utahns, the State Park Commission's efforts on behalf of the old Fairfield stage station are part and parcel of a new philosophy regarding the state's historical sites and Utah's scenic regions. It concerns more than some old structures, and concerns more than mere acreage. The governor has urged his Park Commission to proceed with this message in mind: "This is your heritage. Cherish it, preserve it, protect it, foster it. Transmit knowledge of it to your children and all who come after us."

Seemingly, a good start has been made in that direction.

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At the intersection of Main and South Temple streets adjacent to Temple Square, Salt Lake City, stands the Brigham Young Monument. The illuminated spires of the Mormon Temple are in the background.

Photo Hal Rumel.

HISTORY

AND SCENERY

Utah has a double-barreled attraction to tourists! Its variety and amount of scenery is unsurpassed by any other state in the Union. But of equal importance for the visitor is its history, which is at once unique and typical.

The history and the scenery are inextricably bound together. The spectacular sight is usually joined with a dramatic event or series of happenings. How can one separate the beauties of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, its River Jordan, and the great salt sea from the story of the people who conquered and settled the region? The significance of the vast sterile wastes of the salt desert to the west is meaningless without at least a modest understanding of die prehistory of the ancient lake and, much later, man's struggle to conquer the area, including the tragedy of the Donners in 1846. Not until the twentieth century and the building of the railroad and modern highway was the Great Salt Desert a safe place for man to venture. Utah's greatest single attraction, Temple Square, would be just another collection of rather odd buildings were it not for the history of the people to whom it represents the center of their spiritual world. Again, how can one separate the spectacular scenery of the great canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers from the history of their discovery by men like Escalante, the explorations by fur trappers, the exploits of Powell and his men and the other great geological survey parties of the late nineteenth century, the search for gold along their banks, and the feats of the countless river runners who since have followed. To be more specific, how can the visitor appreciate the

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"Hole-in-the-Rock" without a mind's eye picture of the people who struggled through its notch on their way to the San Juan Mission ? The dramatic formations and colors of Bryce really take on meaning when one hears the story of Ebenezer Bryce hunting for his lost cow.

Aside from the dramatic scenery that is to be found in every section of the state, there is a unique quality about Utah that is of interest to the visitor, whether he is aware of it or not. The cultural elements of the state, that is, the close-knit Mormon village, its houses, churches and public buildings, the small farms — the very face of the land itself — all bespeak that this is Mormon country with a history and a philosophy that is peculiarly its own.

At the same time, Utah is typically the West. Vast distances; high mountains; broad deserts; Indian life, lore and legend; mining, both in the present and in the past; the cowboy and sheepherder; the story of the building of the great Pacific railroad; the Pony Express; the stagecoach and the telegraph — all are part of the stereotype of the West and are here in Utah in great quantity in both fact and fiction.

This "Parks and Scenic Wonders" issue of the Quarterly has been put together to demonstrate that history and scenery are truly bound together. The Utah State Historical Society is anxious and willing to co-operate with other state agencies, such as the Tourist and Publicity Council, the State Parks Commission, and others, in the preservation and development of Utah's great natural resources in the form of its beautiful land and glorious past. It is hoped that this special number of the Quarterly is received for what it is — a demonstration of this close relationship between the land and its people, their environment and history. History does not take place in a vacuum. There must be a stage and a setting, and Utah has both in superabundance.

A. R. MORTENSEN, Editor

SELECTED READINGS ON UTAH'S HISTORIC AND SCENIC WONDERS

T h e selected reading list has been compiled to serve the visitor or native who has become intrigued with the beauties and wonders of Utah and its history and desires to acquire more background. Books listed, for the most part, are still in print and should be available for purchase.

All or most should be available in libraries. Magazine articles on related subjects were published in the past year or two, and all are in the Utah State Historical Society library.

ALTER, J. CECIL. Through 1927.

the Heart of the Scenic West. Salt Lake City,

BERNHEIMER, CHARLES L. Rainbow Bridge. N e w York, 1929.

BJARNASON, LOFTER. The Geography BOUTWELL, JOHN M. The Salt La\e Washington, D . C , 1933.

of Utah. N e w York, 1932.

Region.

BRUHN, ARTHUR F . Your Guide to Southern Lake City, 1952.

(A Geological Guide.)

Utah's Land of Color. Salt

CORLE, EDWIN. The Story of the Grand Canyon. N e w York, 1952.

(First published in 1946 under title: Listen Bright Angel.)

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UTAH HISTORICAL

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DELLENBAUGH, FREDERICK S. A Canyon Voyage. ( T h e canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers on the second Powell expedition, 187172.) N e w York, 1908. . The Romance of the Colorado River. N e w York, 1904.

DUNKLE, DAVID H . The World of the Dinosaurs.

1957.

HAWKES, H . BOWMAN. Mormon Country. raphy.) Salt Lake City, 1955.

Washington, D . C ,

( A Survey of Utah's Geog-

H U N T , CHARLES B. Geology and Geography of the Henry Region of Utah. Washington, D . C , 1953.

INMAN, HENRY, and CODY, WILLIAM F .

The

Mountains

Great Salt Lake

Trail.

N e w York, 1898.

JENKINS, A B , and ASHTON, WENDELL J. The Salt of the Earth.

(Auto-

mobile racing on Bonneville Salt Flats.) Salt Lake City, 1939.

JOHNSON, HUMPHREY C. Scenic Guide to Utah. Susanville, California, 1947.

KELLY, CHARLES. Salt Desert Trails. Salt Lake City, 1930.

KLINCK, RICHARD E. Land of Room Enough and Time Enough. ment Valley.) Albuquerque, 1953.

MILLER, JOSEPH. Monument 1951.

(Monu-

Valley and the Navajo Country. N e w York,

MORGAN, DALE L. The Great Salt Lake.

Indianapolis, 1947. . The Humboldt, Highroad ica Series.") N e w York, 1943.

("American Lakes Series.")

of the West.

MURBARGER, NELL. Ghosts of the Glory Trail. camps, etc.] Palm Desert, California, 1956.

("Rivers of Amer-

[Ghost towns, mining

PAUL, JOSHUA H . Out of Doors in the West. Salt Lake City, 1911.

PEATTIE, RODERICK. The Inverted N e w York, 1948.

Mountains:

Canyons of the

West.

SELECTED

READINGS

ON UTAH

301

POWELL, JOHN W . Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and its Tributaries, Explored in 1869,1870,1871, and 1872. Washington, 1875. . The Exploration

of the Colorado River.

Chicago, 1957.

ROYLANCE, WARD J. Rainbow Roads Guide to Highways Salt Lake City, 1953.

91, 89, and 191.

SIMPSON, JAMES H . Report of Explorations Across the Great Basin of the Territory of Utah ...in 1859. Washington, D . C , 1876.

STANSBURY, HOWARD. Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah. Philadelphia, 1852.

STEGNER, WALLACE. Mormon N e w York, 1942.

Country.

. This is Dinosaur.

STEWARD, JULIAN H . Ancient Washington, D . C , 1937.

STORY, ISABELLE. The National D . C , 1957.

("American Folkways Series.")

N e w York, 1955.

Caves of the Great Salt La\e

Par\ Story in Pictures.

Region.

Washington,

TALMAGE, JAMES E. The Great Salt Lake, Past and Present.

City, 1900.

Salt Lake

TILLOTSON, M . R., and TAYLOR, FRANK J. Grand Canyon Country.

Stan-

ford, California, 1935. Reprinted 1953.

U.S. Department of the Interior. The Colorado River.

1946.

UNTERMANN, G. E., and B. R. Geology of Dinosaur ment and Vicinity. Salt Lake City, 1954.

Utah Historical

Washington,

National

Monu-

Quarterly:

Vol. XII, WOODBURY, A. M . A History Parks. Salt Lake City, 1944.

of Southern

Utah and Its

Vol. X V , X V I , and XVII, The Exploration of the Colorado in 1869,1871-72. Salt Lake City, 1947,1948-49.

River

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UTAH HISTORICAL

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Vol. XVIII, BOLTON, HERBERT E. Pageant in the Wilderness, The Story of the Escalante Expedition to the Interior Basin, 1776.

Salt Lake City, 1950.

Vol. XIX, KORNS, J. RODERIC. West From Fort Bridger, The Pioneering of the Immigrant Trails Across Utah 1845-1850, ed.

Dale L. Morgan. Salt Lake City, 1951.

Utah Publicity and Industrial Development Department. After Victory; Plans for Utah and the Wasatch Front. Salt Lake City, 1943.

WATERS, FRANK. The Colorado.

York, 1946.

WEST, RAY B. Rocky Mountain

("Rivers of America Series.")

New

Cities. N e w York, 1949.

WHIPPLE, MAURINE. This is the Place; Utah. N e w York, 1945.

WOLLE, MURIEL S. The Bonanza Trail; Ghost Towns Camps of the West. Bloomington, Indiana, 1953.

WOODBURY, JOHN T . Vermilion St. George, 1933.

Cliffs; Reminiscences

and

Mining

of Utah's

Dixie.

Writers' Program, Works Progress Administration. Utah, A Guide to the State. N e w York, 1941. Reprinted 1954.

Zion-Bryce Natural History Association. Geologic and Geographic Sketches of Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks. [1956]. . National Parks and National Monuments National Park, 1948. Printed in several editions.

of Utah.

Zion

ARTICLES DOUGLAS W . SCHWARTZ, "Climate Change and Culture History in the Grand Canyon Region," American Antiquity, April, 1957.

Lucius BEEBE, "Pandemonium at Promontory," American December, 1957.

Heritage,

PHILIP NEWILL, "The Whispering Mountains [Uranium in the land of the Navajos]," Arizona Highways, July, 1956.

CHARLES FRANKLIN PARKER and

JEANNE S. HUMBURG, "89 the

of International Grandeur," ibid., March, 1957.

Highway

SELECTED

READINGS

ON UTAH

303

-, " T h e Trailblazers of Grand Canyon," ibid., May, 1957.

CHARLES FRANKLIN PARKER, " T h e Kaibab and the N o r t h Rim," ibid.

EDWIN CORLE, "A Canyon is Born," ibid.

JOYCE ROCKWOOD M U E N C H , "Land of the Sleeping Rainbow

[Utah],"

ibid., June, 1957.

RALPH D . BARNEY and D A N GASHLER, "Hole-in-the-Rock Historic Spot

May Become Utah's N e w Tourist Mecca," Church News [Deseret News], May 11,1957.

CLAY P . MALICK, " T h e Dinosaurs go to Washington," The Quarterly, Summer, 1956.

Colorado

CARL I. W H E A T , " T h e 1954 Navajo Canyon Expedition" [excerpts from a preliminary report], Corral Dust (Potomac Corral of the Westerners), June, 1956.

RANDALL HENDERSON, "Petrified Forests in Utah's Circle Cliffs," Desert Magazine, June, 1956. , "Boat T r i p in the Canyon of Ladore," ibid., July, 1956. , "Just Between You and Me [Reclamation and the Glen Canyon D a m ] , " ibid.

KITRIDGE W I N G , "Blue Water Voyage in the Little Colorado," ibid., August, 1956.

W . G. CARROLL, "Jeep Trail into Utah's Rugged Needles Country," ibid., November, 1956.

JOSEF AND JOYCE MUENCH, " T h e Hole in the Rock," ibid., April, 1957.

NELL MURBARGER, " D a m in Glen Canyon," ibid.

RANDALL HENDERSON, " W e Camped in the Land of the Standing Rocks" [southeastern U t a h ] , ibid., October, 1957.

N E L L MURBARGER, "Flaming Gorge D a m on the Green River," ibid., January, 1958.

304

UTAH HISTORICAL

QUARTERLY

ELIZABETH RIGBY, "Primitive Village in Havasupai Canyon," ibid.

JOSEF AND JOYCE MUENCH, "Crossing of the Fathers," ibid., March, 1958.

CECIL M. OUELLETTE, "Over the T o p of Landscape Arch" [Arches National Monument, U t a h ] , ibid.

CORNELIUS C. SMITH, JR., "Navajo and Hopi Country," Ford December, 1957.

Times,

WILLARD LUCE, "Natural Bridges National Monument," ibid., January, 1958.

WALLACE STEGNER, " T h e World's Strangest Sea [Great Salt Lake]," Holiday, May, 1957.

"Explorers Dedicate the George Albert Smith Arch," Improvement October, 1957.

Era,

"Deep in Zion Canyon," Sunset Magazine, April, 1956.

"Family Adventure . . . the River Run," ibid.

"There's Still Room to Wander in the Capitol Reef Country," ibid., April, 1957.

"Ghost T o w n in Southern Utah [Grafton]," ibid., December, 1957.

RUSSELL R. RICH, "Bear Lake Valley Before the Mormons," SUP September, 1956.

News,

DAVID E. MILLER, "Paria Canyon," ibid., January, 1957.

M. CAROL HETZEL, "Navajo Outpost [Monument Valley]," February, 1957.

Westways,

HARRY C JAMES, "A Dinosaur Track — A Broom — and Poli," ibid., January, 1958.

"Winter Comes to Bryce Canyon," ibid.

"Petrified Forest of the Circle Cliffs [southern U t a h ] , " ibid., February, 1958.

UTAH

STATE

HISTORICAL

BOARD OF TRUSTEES (Terms Expiring April

1,1961)

JUANITA BROOKS, St. George

LELAND H. CREER, Salt Lake City NICHOLAS c. MORGAN, SR., Salt Lake City JOEL E. RICKS, Logan RUSSEL B . S W E N S E N ,

(Terms

PrOVO

Expiring April 1, 1959)

SOCIETY

OFFICERS 1957-59 LELAND H. CREER, President NICHOLAS c. MORGAN, SR., Vice-President

A. R. MORTENSEN, Director PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE JUANITA BROOKS, Chairman L E V I EDGAR YOUNG A. K . M O R T E N S E N

LOUIS BUCHMAN, Salt Lake City

MEMBERSHIP COMMITTEE

GEORGE F. EGAN, Salt Lake City

JOEL E. RICKS, Chairman

CHARLES R. MABEY, Bountiful

A. R . M O R T E N S E N

WILLIAM F. MC CREA, Ogden

LEVI EDGAR YOUNC, Salt Lake City

PUBLIC RELATIONS COMMITTEE GEORCE F. EGAN, Chairman

(Ex-Officio

Member)

W I L L I A M F . M C CREA

LAMONT F. TORONTO, Secretary of State

CHARLES R . M A B E Y

EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTIONS: The Society was or-

The Utah State Historical Society assumes no responsibility for statements made by contributors to this publication.

ganized essentially to collect, disseminate and preserve important material pertaining to the history of the state . To effect this end, contributions of manuscripts are solicited, such as old diaries, journals, letters, and other writings of the pioneers^ also original manuscripts by present-day writers on any phase of early Utah history. Treasured papers or manuscripts may be printed in faithful detail in the Quarterly, without harm to them, and without permanently removing them from their possessors.

Contributions for the consideration of the Publications Committee, and correspondence relating thereto, should be addressed to the Editor, Utah State Historical Society, 603 East South Temple, Salt Lake City 2, Utah.

MEMBERSHIP: Membership in the Society is $3.00 per year. The Utah Historical Quarterly is sent free to all members. Non-members and institutions may receive the Quarterly at $3.00 a year or $1.00 for current numbers. Life membership, $50.00.

Checks should be made payable to the Utah State Historical Society and mailed to the Editor, 603 East South Temple, Salt Lake City 2, Utah.

Entered as second-class matter January 5, 1953, at the Post Office at Salt Lake City, Utah, under the Act of August 24, 1912.