“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”….Dwight D. Eisenhower
I found this sign on the roadside outside of Helper, UT. It made me laugh and I had to turn around to read it. Little did I know then, that what I would be seeing the rest of the day was the real version of “History on Other Side.” My destination was Nine Mile Canyon (a misnomer, it is really about 40 miles long) well known for its many Indian petroglyphs and pictographs. Nine Mile Canyon was home to the Fremont peoples from about 900 – 1300 AD, and then European settlers from about the mid 1800’s.
For me, this story begins when I was 7 years old, driving across country with my parents for the first time. The combination of no freeways (this was 1954) and being 7 made this a very, very long trip. When we reached the desert Southwest, the landscape outside the car window was like a fantasy land, something I had never seen or really even imagined. Hard to believe, but this was also before television, and I had no images of the West in my head. This was my first experience with the impressive land forms of the SW and I was awestruck. For two days, I sketched and drew what sped by the car window. We never got close, and that landscape of mesas, painted rock and stunted plants, remained at a distance, but I never forget the beauty or the awe.
In the course of my adult life, I have been across the desert SW many times. But it has always been a repeat of my childhood experience. Always at a distance, always viewed in passing and though the barrier of a car window. This trip today would be my chance to come face to face, not just with the landscape, but also with the art of the ancient people of this land, and through that, their lives. At least that is what I hoped for. And I was not disappointed.
What emerged from my 8 hour trip into the canyons was an unbelievable feeling about the harshness of life on the other side of history, and how comfortable and convenient our lives are by comparison. Although the canyons were used from at least 900 AD by the Fremont people, it appears that they abandoned this place sometime before the arrival of the settlers in the 1800’s. The story of the settlers is harsh as well. One small story speaks loudly. A rancher by the name of Pace, apparently in deep despair, cut his own throat in the middle of a cold, cruel winter.
The abandoned settlers cabins and ranches were evident all along the canyon floor, and I kept expecting to come across evidence of the Indian’s homes. Although the canyons are filled with rock art, there is no evidence of permanent villages. There are granaries and storage caches, as well as some pit houses, but nothing that suggests year round settlements of any significance. That suggests that the canyons were used as seasonal farms and hunting grounds. Given the failure of the settlers to make it year round in this place, that makes sense.
What struck me as well, was the fact that a harsh environment, as this is from an agrarian, rancher perspective, does not fit well with the Euro-American model of land ownership or the rugged individualism of early settlers. What contributed to the collapse of the settler’s ranches and farms was the fact that each one was spaced about a mile apart on a sinuous canyon river bottom. There was no community, no central rallying point or physical place where they could congregate, mix and share. Consequently it only took about 50 years or so for the Euro-American model of life in this area to effectively collapse.
Indian societies survived and used this area for 700-800 years, and probably only really changed as a result of the introduction of the horse into their lives. Built more on a co-operative, tribal hunter-gatherer-forager-farmer (they were all these things), they were better able to take advantage of and exploit the opportunities for growing food and hunting animals that were present. And the wonderful thing for us – they left us photo albums.
And with that my story ends, and I will let the photos tell their own story. Hope you get a chance to visit Nine Mile Canyon.
PS. The first few photos are “on the way” and the last few are “heading home”. The bulk in the middle are the canyons.
| Nine Mile Canyon |
