A New Look at old Treasures

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 26, 1958, No. 3

A NEW LOOK AT OLD TREASURES

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 — 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 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 — smaller than the sum spent for lawn maintenance in some city park systems — 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 purposes—-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, making 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 — 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 — 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 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.

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 — all adjacent to the confluence of the Colorado and Green rivers — 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. Therefore, 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 "Mormon War" of 1857-58 and of Pony Express and stagecoach days — all readily available — 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-the- Rock 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 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 — 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 — 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 providing 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 — 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, of Johnston's Army — 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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