Nine Mile: Eastern Utah's Forgotten Road

BY EDWARD A. GEARY

In area Utah is almost equally divided between the Great Basin on the west and north and the Colorado Plateau on the east and south. However, the state’s population and its best-known history are concentrated in the Great Basin half. Except for the Virgin River Valley, the Colorado Plateau was late to be settled, difficult to develop because of its terrain, and generally held in small esteem, as was indicated in the 1861 report on the Uinta Basin which termed it a “vast contiguity of waste . . . valueless excepting for nomadic purposes, hunting grounds for Indians and to hold the world together.” 1

One important reason for the little understanding or appreciation of eastern Utah in the early days was the difficulty of access. A continuous mountain barrier separates eastern and western Utah, with very few natural passes. The Dominguez-Escalante party crossed through Strawberry Valley and Diamond Fork, which has never developed into a through route, later travelers having preferred the Daniels Summit route out of Strawberry Valley. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century the most important route across the region was the Old Spanish Trail, which crossed Salina Pass. The Rio Grande Railway, after first looking at Salina Canyon, chose the Midland Trail over Soldier Summit. These three passes, Daniels, Soldier Summit, and Salina, remain the only feasible year-round routes, with the addition of the route over Fishlake Pass from Richfield to the Fremont River Valley. South of that point, the rugged canyon country makes a through road virtually impossible, as the Hole-in-the-Rock party discovered a century ago.

Within the province of eastern Utah, too, the historic routes remain important today: the Escalante and the Gunnison crossings of the Green River and the Spanish Valley route to the San Juan country. But there is one road, very important in the development of eastern Utah, that has fallen into near obscurity and disuse: the route between Price and Fort Duchesne, which for some twenty years was probably the most heavily traveled wagon road in eastern Utah and was aptly termed the “Lifeline of Uinta Basin.” 2

The key segment of this road ran through Nine Mile Canyon, one of the most colorful and little-known areas in Utah. Nine Mile does not quite belong to any of the state’s usually recognized regions. From Castle Valley, the West Tavaputs Plateau forms the northern skyline, and the usual perception is that the Uinta Basin lies on the other side. From the Basin, on the other hand, the southern vista is of dry benches terminating in the Bad Land Cliffs. But between those landmarks there lies a long east-west canyon that straddles the Carbon-Duchesne county line and belongs really to neither valley. The canyon heads at about 8,000 feet on the West Tavaputs Plateau and drains into the Green River at an elevation of 4,610 feet. The settled portion lies at about the same elevation as the Uinta Basin and Castle Valley, but the landscape more nearly resembles that of the southern Utah canyonlands with its vivid contrast of castellated cliffs and bright green fields on the canyon floor. The climate, too, is considerably milder than that of the Uinta Basin. The reasons for this seem to be primarily the air drainage provided by the canyon and perhaps also the tendency of the south-facing cliffs to hold the sun’s warmth in the winter. In any case, old-timers in Nine Mile brag that they can raise fruits that would be impossible to raise in the Basin.

The Nine Mile region is rich in prehistorical interest. It was an important center of the Fremont Culture and has numerous petroglyphs and ruins that have been the object of archaeological investigations since the 1890s. 3 The canyon was apparently a route for trappers and Mexican slave traders as well as Indians. There is a possible Spanish inscription at the mouth of one side canyon, together with a date that may be 1819 but has also been read as 1839 and 1879. 4

Human occupation goes way back in Nine Mile, then, but it is difficult to determine just when the region first became known to the white settlers of Utah. The 1866 General Land Office map of Utah shows a stream labeled White River in the approximate location of Nine Mile. The Price River was originally named the White River (as one of its tributaries still is), but the 1866 map also shows (though it does not label) the Price River in its approximately correct location. More precise mapping of eastern Utah awaited the Powell surveys beginning in 1869. The earliest known reference to the name Nine Mile is found in the profile map appended to Powell’s Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries (1875). 5 In the 1878 Powell volume on the arid lands, A. H. Thompson gives a good though brief description of the canyon but calls the creek the Minnie Maud. 6 The 1878 U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey map adopts the same name for the creek but shows Nine Mile Valley as the upper portion of the south fork of the Minnie Maud.

Thus, from the earliest reports occurs the confusion of names that has persisted to the present. The canyon, as far as current research can tell, has usually been called Nine Mile, but the creek has more often been known as the Minnie Maud. The 1950 Rand McNally standard map of Utah adds another element to the confusion by identifying an “8 Mile Creek” between Nine Mile Valley and Minnie Maud Creek. The 1976 USGS map reverses the names, making the main creek Nine Mile and the south fork the Minnie Maud. This is apparently the official designation now, as a result of efforts to clarify water rights on the creek. 7

The existence of two names for the same creek and canyon has led to numerous folk etymologies. One story has it that Minnie and Maud were sisters who lived in the upper part of the canyon. (There are two similarly shaped hills near the confluence of two upper tributaries that are referred to as Minnie and Maud.) 8 Another view holds that the name has an Indian origin, and it is sometimes spelled as one word, Minnemaud. The name Nine Mile poses problems because it is difficult to find a distinct stretch of the canyon that is nine miles long. One story from Carbon County claims that an early traveler, on asking how far he had to go, received the reply, “About nine mile.” 9 Another folk account, this one from Duchesne, has it that the name does not refer to distance at all but rather to the Miles family with its seven daughters, thus, with the parents, “the nine Mileses.” 10 However, the region was called Nine Mile long before the Miles family arrived. Howard Price suggests that the name Nine Mile might have come from the nine-mile triangulation used by Powell’s surveyor, and that Powell might have had a niece named Minnie Maud. 11 It is clear at any rate that both names were used by the Powell party.

If the names in Nine Mile are confusing and sometimes contradictory, it is equally difficult to determine when the first white settlement of the canyon occurred. No doubt cattle herds ranged through the area in the 1870s, as they did throughout eastern Utah. The Midland Trail, which was a well-established route by the late 1860s, passed within two miles of the canyon; and the Price River settlers, who came by this route, would likely have known of its existence in 1878. However, the 1878 USGS map does not show even a trail running through the canyon. Mildred Dillman claims that the first settlers came into Nine Mile “long before 1880” but does not specify a year. 12 The earliest names associated with Nine Mile and the West Tavaputs Plateau in the local histories are those of George Whitmore and Shedrach Lunt, who had established ranches in the area, though not in Nine Mile Canyon itself, by 1880. 13

It seems doubtful that settlers came into Nine Mile before the building of the road in the fall of 1886. At any rate, this marked the beginning of Nine Mile’s real importance in the development of eastern Utah. The Nine Mile route provides the lowest elevation entry point into the Uinta Basin from the rest of Utah. However, the first settlers in the Basin, in the Ashley Valley area, entered by the much higher Strawberry Valley route, and for the first decade this long and often impassable trail remained their chief supply line. The U.S. Army hacked out a wagon road through the Uinta Mountains to Carter, Wyoming, in about 1882 to supply Fort Thornburgh. 14 With the establishment of Fort Duchesne in August 1886 this route was used for supplies at first but was clearly not satisfactory. The Salt Lake Tribune reported in a dispatch from Fort Bridger that “there seems to be much doubt regarding the route of transportation to be adopted for the new post. There is arriving at Carter station over one million pounds of freight to be sent forward, and the contractor, Mr. Winston, of Virginia, is pushing it forward as fast as he can, the distance being 130 miles.” 15

This was about forty miles farther and almost 2,000 feet higher than the Nine Mile route to the railroad at Price, a fact that must have impressed itself on the military leaders, since the Tribune of October 8, 1886, reported the return of Fort Douglas troops to their post after constructing “a first-class roadway from Price’s Station to Fort Duchesne.” 16

According to a family tradition, John A. Powell, one of the early settlers of Price, assisted the army in locating the route through Gate Canyon and Nine Mile. 17 This would indicate that there was not an established road before that time. However, Henry Fiack, one of the original soldiers at Fort Duchesne, wrote of “making the road to Price passable,” which could suggest that they improved an earlier road. 18

It rapidly became a well-traveled way after that time. In April 1887 work was begun on a telegraph line that was completed in August. 19 According to Henry Fiack, the line was no sooner constructed than “a bunch of young Ute braves promptly cut it down and made firewood out of the poles, with the net result that the cavalry herded them to the fort, where they were confined to the guardhouse for a time, on a very wholesome diet of bread and water.” 20 In July the Tribune published a dispatch from Price arguing that “It [Price] ought to be the point for sending mail to Fort Duchesne and the Uintah country, and the report of an agent of the Postoffice Department lately visiting here may result in sending this mail over this route. It is claimed that it is a much better route than from the Union Pacific in Wyoming.” 21 The same dispatch reported, “A contract for hauling 2,000,000 pounds of Government supplies to Fort Duchesne, from here, was lately let at the low figure of $1.12 per 100 pounds. The distance is about ninety miles and requires about fifteen days for the big teams to make the round trip.”

Two million pounds would represent more than 220 trips for a two-wagon outfit, if one accepts Evelyn Richardson’s estimate of 9,000 pounds as the maximum capacity. 22 At an average of fifteen days per trip, that means more than 3,300 man-days on the road for this contract alone. The “low figure” of $1.12 per hundred represents an income of $22,400 for the contractor and teamsters. These figures take on added significance when one considers that the population of Price was less than 500 at that time. Clearly, the freight business had a heavy impact. Indeed, it was probably the chief factor in establishing Price as a commercial center for the region.

The “first-class roadway” evidently left something to be desired because the Tribune reported in September 1887 that troops from Fort Douglas were again working on the road. One of the soldiers wrote, “There are quite a few travel this road, to different mines, the Fort, Ashley and surrounding country. . . .” 23 Thus, in its first year the Nine Mile road had clearly established itself as the main route to and from the Uinta Basin. A twice-weekly stage line was established in 1888 to carry passengers and mail, and this became a daily service in 1889. 24 Also in 1889 the first gilsonite mines were opened in the Basin, enabling the freighters to haul a full load both ways. The Price Eastern Utah Telegraph reported in its first issue that 1,618,407 pounds of freight had been shipped to Price on the railroad in the single month of December 1890. 25 The following week the Telegraph reported, “Half a million of gilsonite has been shipped from this point in the last eight days.” 26

In light of the strong strain of boosterism that characterized the rural press in those days, it is doubtful that these are typical figures, but clearly the freight traffic to and from the Uinta Basin was heavy—perhaps an average of fifty trips per week, each way. Considering that the round trip took two weeks or more, that means there were about a hundred teamsters on the road at a time. The army constructed a warehouse in Price and stationed a quartermaster there to receive incoming freight. A large campground developed that was for several years a prominent feature of Price, where teamsters waited for their wagons to be loaded. There is further evidence of the activity on the freight road in the numbers of freighters cited in local histories. Richardson includes thirty-one names in an admittedly incomplete list of teamsters from the Vernal area. 27 Arthur E. Gibson, writing of early Carbon County, says, “Most of our farmers and early settlers were . . . also freighters. Money was not as plentiful in those days as it is today and any farmer who had either two, four, or six good horses and a couple of wagons would be ready at most any time to make a trip on the freight road.” 28 In addition, the Indian agencies had their own outfits and hauled a large portion of their own freight with Indian teamsters.

Normally, the individual teamsters did not deal directly with the army or the Gilson Asphaltum Company. Instead, merchants in Price and Vernal would contract for the transportation of goods and then subcontract to individual freighters at the usual rate of one dollar per hundred pounds, sometimes in cash but more often in merchandise, or “calico pay.” 29 Theoretically, a freighter with a good outfit and a full load both ways could make as much as ninety dollars per week on the freight road. In practice it is unlikely that anyone approached that income because of the irregularity of shipments, the uncertainties of the weather, which could sometimes make the trip take twice as long as normal, and the expenses of maintaining the teams and equipment. Moreover, the freighter was liable to deductions if there were any loss or damage to the goods, and sometimes the teamsters felt that they were shortchanged by different methods of calculating weights at different ends of the route. 30

On the other hand, there were sometimes opportunities to make extra money. My grandfather, who drove on the freight road throughout the 1890s, recalled a trip in 1897 when the agent at Ouray offered him twice the usual rate—and in gold—if he would haul a load of wool to Price in one of his wagons instead of gilsonite. Grandpa used his windfall to finance an excursion to the Pioneer Jubilee celebration in Salt Lake City later that summer. 31

All in all, the freight road made an important economic contribution to the development of eastern Utah, especially in the depression years of the 1890s when money was scarce. Price benefited the most from this economic infusion, a fact that led to some envy in Vernal, which was a larger community than Price throughout the freight road years. The rivalry between the two towns is apparent in this early comment in the Uintah Pappoose:

They are talking of incorporating Price, making a city of it. We are glad of it for there will be a city we country verdants can feel at ease in. We can have all the excitement of knowing we are in a metropolis and as we walk its thoroughfares hooking little fingers how natural and homelike to have to jump a sage brush to get into the city hall or wade a swamp from an overflowed ditch to get to church or to tip our heads to get the alkali dust from our ears before we can listen with awe, as the mayor welcomes us and presents us with the freedom of the city. Hadn’t you better wait and let Vernal show you what a city ought to be? 32

Although Price and Vernal were rivals for the role of metropolis of eastern Utah, they were by no means near neighbors. The distance between them via Nine Mile is about 120 miles, or almost as great as the distance from Price to Salt Lake City. Moreover, the road, despite the periodic labor of the soldiers, was notoriously bad. The most hazardous stretches lay in the higher elevations of Soldier Canyon and in Gate Canyon, which was subject to flash floods. Some teamsters claimed that they had to walk beside their teams in Soldier Canyon during wet weather to hold them on the road. 33 In December 1891 the Eastern Utah Telegraph reported, “We have heard a great deal of complaint in the last week in regards to the wagon road up soldier canyon. They say it is almost impossible for a team to get over it, as the road is a glare of ice, besides great danger of upsetting and killing their teams and smashing their wagons to pieces.” 34 Though the low-elevation pass was usually free from heavy snow, there were occasional storms so heavy that the troops from Fort Duchesne had to be called out to clear away the drifts. 35 In one such storm, in 1891, the stage was stranded for an entire week before a rescue party could reach it. 36 But even in the best weather it was a difficult trip. As Mildred Miles Dillman, herself a Nine Mile native, puts it, “To ride on the stage with its swinging seat of buckskin over that road was an experience not to be duplicated in many other places in the world and, thank heaven, not very often.” 37

The teamsters who traveled the route regularly became well acquainted with one another, and a fellowship of the road developed as they helped each other repair broken wagons or doubled up their teams to pull exceptionally heavy loads up Gate Canyon. My grandfather remembered one bitterly cold trip when he came close to freezing to death after sitting on the wagon seat all day. At the night’s camp, one of the other freighters recognized the dangerous state he had reached and forced him to run around the camp until his body heat was restored. Besides the regular freighters there were also drifters along the road, men close to the edge of the law. (Nine Mile is the easiest route between the outlaw havens at Brown’s Park and Robbers’ Roost; old-time residents remembered being awakened in the night by herds of stolen horses being driven through the canyon. 38 ) My grandfather recorded an incident in which he suffered an attack of asthma that made him unable to care for his horses, and a young man “with questionable reputation” called “Six-Shooter Bob” offered to drive the team to Price.

The men folks made a bed on top of the load under the cover of one of my wagons and I rode there most all the way to Price, which took five days. We were coming up nine-mile canyon when we met some teams going down the canyon. One of the men was acquainted with “Six-Shooter Bob” and asked whose team he was driving. I heard the conversation from under the cover. Bob answered, “Ed Geary’s.”

“Where is the kid?” the other one asked, and Bob answered, “Oh, he is damn sick and will be dead before we get to Price.” I did not die, however. 39

The settlement of Nine Mile Canyon developed along with the freight road, which provided a supplementary income for many of the residents. Nine Mile has never had a townsite, or a permanent community center, or a ward or branch of the LDS church (which must make it almost unique among Utah communities), though it was, and still is, very much a community. Ranches were scattered along thirty miles of the canyon. The logical center point was William Brock’s ranch at the mouth of Gate Canyon. When the telegraph line was built, a relay station was established there and manned by soldiers from the fort. It was the last campground with good water before the long two-day pull to the Duchesne River, and so the freighters usually camped under the cliffs there. Brock must have been one of the first ranchers to settle in Nine Mile, but his career was a short one as he killed a man named Foote in a dispute and had to flee the country. His place was taken by Pete Francis, who operated a saloon (which still stands, as does the telegraph station) and built a twenty-room hotel. But Francis was also caught in the recurring violence of Nine Mile history, dying in a brawl in his saloon. Shortly thereafter, in 1902, Preston Nutter purchased the Brock ranch from Francis’s widow and made it the headquarters of his far-flung operations. Nutter was not interested in being an innkeeper. He closed the saloon and converted the hotel into a bunkhouse. He kept the peacock he inherited from Pete Francis, however, and found a mate for it, thereby starting the flock of peafowl that remains one of the distinctive features of Nine Mile. 40

The Brock precinct is listed with a population of 50 in the 1890 census. In 1900 the precinct, now called Minnie Maud, had a population of 121. Shortly thereafter, the post office was moved from Brock’s to Frank Alger’s ranch, a couple of miles up the canyon. Alger also drove the stage and operated a small store, and his place became the center of activity in the canyon for a time. In 1905 the name of the precinct and post office was changed to Harper, and the 1910 census showed the population at its high point of 130. The precinct center remained quite movable. The rock house of E. L. Harmon was the main stage stop for a time, and there was a schoolhouse nearby. The last stage stop was the Ed Lee ranch, where the log hotel still stands and the names of the horses can still be seen over the harness pegs in the old barn. 41

The stage line had stations spaced about twenty miles apart along the route, and the freighters tended to camp at the same locations since twenty miles was a good day’s travel for their teams. From Price the road went over the foothills to the mouth of Soldier Canyon. The first stopping place was Soldier Station. The second night, for the freighters, was spent in the upper reaches of Nine Mile Canyon. The stage evidently made its second stop in the middle reaches of the canyon at the stations mentioned. The third stage stop, and in some ways the most interesting, was at Smith’s Wells in the waterless stretch of the southern Uinta Basin. Here Owen Smith dug a deep well for water and built a hotel and other buildings from the native rock. 42 The next stop and campground was at Bridges (present-day Myton) on the Duchesne River. From there it was one stage farther to Fort Duchesne, and there was another stage stop and campground between the fort and Vernal.

Over this route, then, passed the great bulk of the freight, passenger, and mail traffic to and from the Uinta Basin for many years. In 1905 the Uintah Railway was opened from Mack, Colorado, to Dragon, Utah, and this took most of the gilsonite shipments. This loss of traffic was more than offset by the opening of the Indian reservation to settlement in the same year. The majority of homesteaders came by the Nine Mile route as did the supplies to maintain them. The agricultural products of the Basin continued to be carried to market on this road as well, including the large quantities of alfalfa seed produced in those years. The Uintah Railway attempted to capture the mail and passenger traffic in 1910, but Nine Mile held its own. The Vernal Express of May 27, 1910, reported, “The mail company which Mr. Lee represents has bought the Soldier Station and the Wells, and all the stations along the road will be equipped to give perfect satisfaction. Soldier Station will be a stopping place for dinner. A change of horses at Myton, dinner at Moffat and then to Vernal. Four of the best Concord coaches have been bought for the service and sixty good horses.” 43

In the end, it was not the railroad that brought the eclipse of the Nine Mile road (the Uintah Railway itself ceased operation after a few years), but alternative wagon and automobile routes. The higher but shorter route from Castle Gate to Duchesne over Indian Canyon was improved in 1919–20, and the mail was carried by that route until 1934 when the Daniels Canyon route, with its more direct connections to the state’s population centers, finally became the main access to the Uinta Basin. 44 The Nine Mile road has seen little improvement over the years, except for an annual grading in preparation for the deer hunt. There is little traffic today except for ranchers, oil and gas drilling crews, the few tourists who deliberately seek out the interesting features of the region, and the unfortunate few who misunderstand Nine Mile as referring to the distance between Myton and Wellington.

Being off the beaten track has its advantages, however, one of which is the preservation of the landscape. There is perhaps no place in Utah where the atmosphere of the Old West is as clearly felt as in Nine Mile. The cattle ranches remain, still benefiting from the natural grazing drift from the summer range on the West Tavaputs Plateau to the winter range in the lower canyons along the Green River. In Nine Mile, indeed, can be found in microcosm the history of the cattle industry from the 1880s to the present: the early expansion of the herds; the sharp decline about 1910 as a result of competition from sheep herds on the Plateau; the sharper decline in the early 1920s with the collapse of the beef market; and the continuing adjustments and consolidation to the present. There are fewer operators today, and far fewer year-round residents, but in the Preston Nutter Corporation there is still a direct link to the great era of cattle ranching in the West. Another link to the Old West can be found in the name of Art Acord, daubed on the rock wall near the Nutter ranch. Acord came to Nine Mile as a runaway boy of about twelve and worked for Nutter until he drove a herd of horses off a cliff. From that inauspicious beginning, he went on to become a championship cowboy and performer in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and later a silent film cowboy star. 45

Many of the ranch houses and outbuildings still remain, though in decay, defining by their intervals the scale of life of an earlier period, and the old shade trees and orchards mark the oases where the teamsters on the freight road found refreshment. The stone Harmon house raises interesting conjectures about architectural influences, as it seems to resemble a European cottage more than the usual folk architecture of early Utah. The Miles-Pace ranch in the lower part of the canyon is almost a museum of ranch life, with its clustered sheds and bunkhouses, its stone ranch house, its cellar built into the canyon wall, and its spectacular setting surrounded by high, vertical cliffs. Traces of the old road remain in the bottom of Gate Canyon, and all along the way there are names and dates written in axle grease on the rocks by teamsters. The iron telegraph poles, erected in 1890–95 to replace the original wooden poles, still march down the canyon carrying the single telephone line. 46 Cattle still graze as they have done for a century in the fields, and the wild black currant bushes grow abundantly along the fence lines, their tart fruit in midsummer coated lightly from the dust of occasional vehicles that pass where once the six-horse teams pulled their heavy loads along eastern Utah’s forgotten road.

By Edward A. Geary

My connection to Nine Mile Canyon had its roots in the summer of 1890 when my grandfather, Edward George Geary, at the age of twelve, first drove a four-horse, two-wagon outfit from the rail head at Price, Utah, to Fort Duchesne on the Uintah Indian Reservation. His father drove a six-horse team, and together they carried (as grandpa recalled seventy years later) a cargo of lumber, kerosene, beer, groceries, and other supplies. For the return trip, they loaded their wagons with Gilsonite. This 200-mile-plus round trip was repeated several times each year for the next decade, providing funds for investments in land and cattle, for the building of a two-story brick home, and for travel to the Salt Lake LDS Temple capstone ceremony in 1892 and the dedication in 1893. These years also provided grandpa with a supply of “freight road stories” that he drew upon to entertain the grandchildren at family gatherings.

As far as I know, grandpa never returned to the Nine Mile Canyon wagon route after his teamster days were succeeded by a Mormon mission, marriage and children, and a busy life of farming and livestock raising, operating a general store, and engaging in a multitude of civic activities. In his last years, in the late 1950s, my aunt and uncle took him once more over the, by then, little-traveled road. Grandpa had an extraordinary memory for events and places, and he directed them unerringly to a cliff face in Gate Canyon where he had painted in axle grease his name and the date May 12, 1893.

Grandpa’s stories merged in my imagination with the Hollywood Westerns that were a staple of the weekly “ward budget” picture shows in our local meetinghouse. The landscape of my heart’s desire became a place of rugged cliffs and desert valleys, a place of heroic adventures, Indians and outlaws, and secret oases where cool spring water flowed through groves of ancient cottonwoods, a place signified by the magical name “Nine Mile Canyon.” After I reached adulthood, I could easily have driven the Nine Mile road myself, but for some reason I did not. Perhaps I was afraid the real place would fall too far short of my boyhood dreamscape.

Then, in 1979, I received an invitation to participate in a series of lectures on the history of Carbon County, sponsored by the Utah State Historical Society, the Carbon County Historical Society, and the College of Eastern Utah, and funded by a grant from the Utah Endowment for the Humanities. The other lecturers focused on the pioneer settlement of the area, the dominant coal industry, and the ethnic diversity of the county. The lectures were later collected in a volume edited by Philip F. Notarianni, Carbon County: Eastern Utah’s Industrialized Island (1981). My own contribution was something of an outlier, focusing on the freight road from Price to the Uinta Basin and its key role in establishing Price as the regional commercial center. The same body of research also yielded my Utah Historical Quarterly article, “Nine Mile: Eastern Utah’s Forgotten Road” (Winter 1981).

The documentary sources were relatively sparse: brief accounts from the Daughters of Utah Pioneers histories of Carbon, Duchesne, and Uintah counties; the Post Returns for Fort Duchesne, available in the Marriott Library at the University of Utah; a few newspaper articles from the 1880s and '90s. There were several archaeological papers from the 1930s, but I was looking then for history, not pre-history. Three articles from the Utah Historical Quarterly provided useful information: Henry Fiack’s account of Fort Duchesne’s early days, published in 1929, and two articles from 1964, “The Utah Military Frontier, 1872–1912,” by Thomas G. Alexander and Leonard J. Arrington, and especially “Preston Nutter: Utah Cattleman, 1886–1936,” by Virginia Nutter Price and John T. Darly.

The field research was a delight. I remember well my first trip on the storied road. Starting from Wellington, you cross the ascending sagebrush flats to the mouth of Soldier Canyon, site of the first way-station for freighters coming from Price. I had grown up near an elderly widow whose husband had been killed when his wagon rolled off the narrow Soldier Canyon dugway. The road had been widened and surfaced to provide access to a coal mine, but it was possible to envision the original road. The road crested the broad expanse of Whitmore Park with its weathered log cabins set amid meadows that extended to aspen and fir groves at higher elevation. The Roan Cliffs loomed behind. Then the road crossed over a ridge to the Nine Mile Creek drainage. (Some geologists claim that Nine Mile Canyon was formed by the Price River before its waters were captured by head erosion in Price Canyon.) A little farther on, Minnie Maud Creek comes in from the west. And then the gradual descent of the long canyon, past old ranch houses and outbuildings in various stages of decay. Water was running in the irrigation ditches, and the yellow and black wild currants were ripening along the fence lines. The iron telegraph poles (reputedly cast from melted-down Confederate cannons, and installed after Indians or freighters cut down the original wooden poles for firewood) still carried a single telephone line. At the Nutter Ranch, the cries of the peafowl still filled the air. Everything was just as it should be. On a subsequent trip I spent half a day with Preston Nutter’s son-in-law, Howard Price, who introduced me to another family link to Nine Mile: the name of Art Acord, my mother’s uncle, inscribed in axle grease on a cliff face near the ranch house. According to Price, Acord had been a runaway teenager who turned up at the ranch and was given a job by Nutter. His cowboy skills were satisfactory, but not his judgment. After being fired for driving some horses off a cliff, he later joined the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and had a Hollywood career in silent Westerns.

Nine Mile was truly a forgotten road in the 1970s, traveled mostly by ranchers and hunters, and impassable in wet weather. I recall spending days in the canyon and meeting only one or two vehicles, or none at all. For the USHS annual conference held in Vernal in 1980 or ’81, the Society chartered a bus that carried participants from Salt Lake to Price, where I gave a lecture, then on to Vernal over the Nine Mile route. It was a slow trip. As the bus was bouncing on the washboard road surface near Smith Wells, Theron Luke (longtime city editor of the Provo Daily Herald, and a USHS board member) remarked that as far as he was concerned the road could have remained forgotten.

But it was not entirely forgotten, even then, and more public attention was soon to come. The 1970s brought a renewed interest in Nine Mile Canyon archaeology led by the Public Archaeology Research Group at BYU and by the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum. Local tourism agencies promoted the canyon as “the World’s Longest Art Gallery,” referring to the unequaled concentration of prehistoric rock art, most of it produced by the Fremont culture between 800 and 1100 years ago. (More than 300 sites in the canyon are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.) Visitor guides to roadside rock art panels were published in 1984 and 1993, complete with warnings not to trespass on the private land where many of the sites are located. In 1990, the once neglected road was designated as a National Back Country Byway. Increased visitation moved a group of mostly local residents to organize the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition in 1991, dedicated to “the preservation and protection” of the area. The Bureau of Land Management in cooperation with Carbon County developed picnic areas, restroom facilities, and interpretive sites at several locations.

A new phase of Nine Mile history opened in 2002 with large-scale development of the natural gas resources on the West Tavaputs Plateau. The gas wells were located in the high country south of Nine Mile Canyon, but the Nine Mile road is the main access, and pipelines and processing facilities were constructed in the canyon. The old wagon road had been improved over the years, but it was not designed for industrial traffic. Dust and vibration from numerous heavy trucks passing near the prehistoric sites aroused widespread public concern. In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation added Nine Mile Canyon to its list of “America’s 11 Most Endangered Places.” The debate over preservation versus economic development is ongoing, but the dust was settled by the paving of the road in 2014, largely with funds provided by the drilling company. So Nine Mile Canyon is an easier drive now than it used to be, but the road still demands some caution as flash floods out of the side canyons can easily leave you stranded.

The literary history of the Nine Mile area has also been enlarged since 1979. The Utah Historical Quarterly published an informative article by H. Burt Jensen on the Smith Wells stagecoach station in 1993. The Utah Centennial County History volumes on Carbon (1997) and Duchesne (1998) counties, authored, respectively, by Ronald G. Watt and John D. Barton, provide updated information on the Nine Mile road. Tom McCourt’s The Split Sky (2003) is an engaging memoir of a summer the author spent working on the Nutter ranch in 1963, when he was sixteen years old. Jerry D. Spangler and Donna K. Spangler published Horned Snakes and Axle Grease, a detailed travel guide, in 2003. Jerry Spangler continues to examine the prehistory and history of the area in Nine Mile Canyon: The Archaeological History of an American Treasure (2013) and Last Chance Byway: The History of Nine Mile Canyon (2016).

My own personal favorite among the chroniclers of Nine Mile is the indefatigable Norma Rich Dalton, who spent her early childhood on a ranch in the canyon and has devoted many years to collecting and publishing the stories of canyon residents through the Newsletter of the Nine Mile Canyon Settlers Association. Norma and her daughter Alene authored the Images of America volume on Nine Mile Canyon (2014), a book rich in historic photographs and a most informative guide to the ranching history. Indeed, to the traveler who wants to get the most out of a visit to Nine Mile Canyon, the best advice I can give is to go slowly, with the Daltons’ book in one hand and the Spanglers’ Horned Snakes and Axle Grease in the other.

1 Deseret News, September 25, 1861; quoted in Charles S. Peterson, Utah: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1977), 137.

2 Evelyn Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” Builders of Uintah: A Centennial History of Uintah County (Uintah County, UT: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1947), 260–63.

3 See, for example, John Gillin, Archeological Investigations in Nine Mile Canyon, Utah: A Re-publication, Anthropological Papers, no. 21 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1905).

4 Interview with Howard C. Price, Jr., July 24, 1980.

5 J. W. Powell, Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872, under the Direction of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C., 1875).

6 A. H. Thompson, “Irrigable Lands of That Portion of Utah Drained by the Colorado River and Its Tributaries,” chap. 9 of John Wesley Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah, ed. Wallace Stegner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 172–73.

7 Price interview.

8 Ibid.

9 Unidentified informant, East Carbon City, Utah, April 10, 1980.

10 Interview with Arwella P. Moon, June 26, 1980; Price interview.

11 Price interview.

12 Mildred Miles Dillman, “Harper (Nine Mile),” Early History of Duchesne County (Duchesne County, UT: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1948), 253.

13 Ibid., 258; James Liddell, “The Cattle and Sheep Industry of Carbon County,” Centennial Echoes from Carbon County (Carbon County, UT: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1948), 51.

14 Thomas G. Alexander and Leonard J. Arrington, “The Utah Military Frontier, 1872–1912: Forts Cameron, Thornburgh, and Duchesne,” Utah Historical Quarterly 32 (1964): 342–43.

15 Salt Lake Tribune, September 2, 1886.

16 Salt Lake Tribune, October 8, 1886.

17 Interview with Leland Powell, March 20, 1980.

18 Henry Fiack, “Fort Duchesne’s Beginnings,” Utah Historical Quarterly 2 (1929): 32.

19 Post Returns, Fort Duchesne, Utah, April, June, July, August, 1887, Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

20 Fiack, “Fort Duchesne’s Beginnings,” 32.

21 Salt Lake Tribune, July 10, 1887.

22 Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” 260.

23 Salt Lake Tribune, September 23, 1887.

24 Post Returns, Fort Duchesne, Utah, August 1888, July 1889.

25 Eastern Utah Telegraph, January 15, 1891.

26 Eastern Utah Telegraph, January 22, 1891.

27 Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” 263.

28 Arthur E. Gibson, “Industries, Other Than Coal, Which Were Important in the Development of Carbon County,” in Centennial Echoes, 45.

29 Ibid., 45; Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” 260.

30 Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” 261.

31 Edward G. Geary, “Personal History,” 13–14, manuscript, 1957, in author’s possession.

32 Uintah Pappoose, January 23, 1891.

33 Dillman, “Harper,” 38.

34 Eastern Utah Telegraph, December 11, 1891.

35 Post Returns, Fort Duchesne, Utah, January 1888, March 1891.

36 Eastern Utah Telegraph, March 5, 1891.

37 Dillman, “Harper,” 256.

38 Price interview.

39 Geary, “Personal History,” 16.

40 Virginia N. Price and John T. Darly, “Preston Nutter: Utah Cattleman, 1886–1936,” Utah Historical Quarterly 32 (1964): 245–47.

41 Dillman, “Harper,” 256–58.

42 Richardson, “Lifeline of Uintah Basin,” 263.

43 Quoted in Builders of Uintah, 265.

44 Dillman, “Harper,” 37–39.

45 Price interview; family records.

46 Post Returns, Fort Duchesne, Utah, July 1890, August 1895.