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Far Out Expeditions, pledging his life to guiding clients to ancient wonders on Cedar Mesa and
The Citadel and Moon House had long since become vaut le voyage stops on the imaginary Michelin tour of Cedar Mesa, even for the most casual dilettantes.
national monument but as an official conservation area.
The great Western historian LeRoy Hafen salutes the Wolfskill/Yount itinerary as “the longest, crookedest, most arduous pack-mule route in the history of America.”
President James Buchanan directed a poorly coordinated series of marches, threats, bluffs, and skirmishes that has come to be known as the Utah War of 1857–58. When all this bluster failed to bring Brigham to heel,
The San Juan Explorers had followed Harts Draw down into Indian Creek.
Indian Creek
Newberry Butte,
This grand enterprise was entrusted to Ferdinand V. Hayden,
Hayden had already won his spurs on an 1867 survey of Nebraska.
William Henry Holmes in charge of his Southwestern or San Juan River Division. Trained as an artist and geologist, Holmes would
William Henry Jackson, whose hard-won glass plate images of wonders such as the Mount of the Holy Cross and ruins on Mesa Verde
was a New York Times reporter named Cuthbert
Washington thus subscribed to the fallacy that would bedevil American relations with Native Americans throughout the nineteenth century: the conviction that a tribe was a unified people, guided by a “big chief,” rather than (in Diné reality) scattered bands each loyal only to a local headman.
And yet, in McPherson’s view, even this addition to the Rez failed to satisfy the land-hungry Indians, for soon “the expanding Navajo population, growing herds of livestock, and the discovery of precious metals eight years later would drastically change the situation.”
no conclusive proof of a Navajo presence in the Southwest before AD 1500 has been established. Partisans of an earlier arrival would push that date back by one or more centuries.
Tsegi.
Tsegi.)
Diné
Diné have a far stronger genetic overlap with Puebloan peoples than any other group—though
only in the mitochondrial DNA of their maternal line.
Even more strikingly, writes Brugge, “the Navajo clan system seems to derive from the Western Pueblo [i.e., Hopi, Zuni, and Acoma] of the Southwest” [emphasis added].
Athapaskans
apotheosis
pothunting
Keet Seel—now acknowledged as the largest of all Southwest cliff dwellings, as well as a consensus choice for the most stunning, complex, and beautiful.
cognomen
Alfred V. Kidder.
Two years later they joined Butch Cassidy (né Robert LeRoy Parker) in the daring robbery of the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colorado, making a clean getaway with $10,500 (some say $21,000) in cash. The
There they confronted the serpentine canyon athwart Cedar Mesa that the Hole-in-the-Rockers had already named Grand Gulch.
Salvation Knoll, cut off by a Route 95 roadcut today, is celebrated in a pullout plaque that hails the topographic
Long stretches of the Mormon route across Cedar Mesa survive today as rugged four-wheel-drive roads. In recent years, those stretches have been adorned with handsome trail markers, black upright posts each topped with a white omega in the shape of a stylized covered wagon.
threading a passage between Fish and Road Canyons. The crux of that passage remains today a gnarly Jeep track looping like the figure “S,” which the pioneers later named The Twist. By the end of March, the team was camped in Comb Wash.
The four scouts in late December had been able to use an old Navajo trail to surmount the Comb (along the route of today’s Route 163, dynamited through the cliff in the 1970s), but there was no way wagons could make such a crossing.
Hole-in-the-Rock Trail.
pooled their talents to build a “road” up the incline, which they named San Juan Hill. Facing the prospect, Lyman laconically noted in his journal, “We
“Today we held meeting and by unanimous consent named our town Bluff City.”
“Most of us secretly feel,” she told me, “that having ancestors who came by wagon is better than having ancestors who came by train. It’s even better when your ancestors came by handcart. And of course you’re practically royalty if you can claim someone in the Martin or Willie companies.”
It’s clear that a kindred baptism in the crucible of survival gilded the Hole-in-the-Rock expedition of 1879–80. Although no emigrant died during the six-month trek
He had coined a term for the Mormon resilience that he believed would win the day: “stickie-ta-tudy.”
Two of the sons of Lehi were Laman (pronounced “LAY-man”) and Nephi (pronounced “NEE-pheye”). During the next several centuries they split into hostile factions, and in 231 BC they began a war that lasted 150 years. The Lamanites, who rejected Christ (himself an emigrant to the New World, during an interval between his resurrection and his ascent into heaven), ended up victorious over the righteous Nephites. The last Nephite, Moroni (pronounced “More-OWN-eye”), buried the golden plates that Joseph Smith would dig up in New York state in 1823 and decipher to produce the Book of Mormon.
Recapture Lodge, one of my favorite hostelries in the world; and Vaughn
1891 rode an eighteen-year-old adventurer from Salina, Utah, called J. A. (Al) Scorup.
would take a government ethnologist with a longer view to grace the sandstone spans with the Hopi names they
bear today: Kachina, Sipapu, and Owachomo.
Scorup
quarters. (The mansion survives today as the Sunset
Grill,
Today State Highway 95 runs from below the Happy Jack to Blanding, offering an easy sixty-mile cruise on blacktop. In 1946, the Bronsons and Cooper had to creep along the Jeep road to Natural Bridges, then climb up and over Elk Ridge and down another winding dirt road to Blanding.
Hat and not incidentally on the Navajo Reservation, the company decided it was imperative to build a new direct road from White Canyon south across Cedar Mesa, then down the 1,100-foot cliff to the bench that slopes south and east toward the San Juan. Thus was born the Moki Dugway, one of the marvels of road engineering anywhere in the West. All
