The Face of the Land

THE FACE OF THE LAND

The area with which we are concerned in the story of Utah's Dixie is that covered by the lower Virgin River drainage system. From time immemorial this land has remained essentially unchanged in spite of man's puny attempts to conquer it.

One should fly over the terrain to see more clearly its natural boundaries and to get perspective. To the south the Colorado River slices through the earth, marking a division which denies all manmade lines. Near it from the top of the ground-swell which culminates in Trumbull Mountain the land on one side is combed down to the stream by millions of gullies, dry except following a rain. On the other side similar dry washes and gulches writhe and twist toward the Virgin River, the pathways of the flood waters of infrequent cloudbursts. The eastern boundary follows the rim of the basin, along the abrupt drop of the Black Ridge, across the Pine Valley Mountains to a seeming endless desert to the north. To the west it terminates at the confluence of the Virgin River and the Colorado.

The air-borne visitor senses how infinitesimal are the areas of man's conquest here: the clusters of houses tied together by the black cord of the highway, the green spots around them widened, some cultivated squares hugging the foothills or opening among the juttings on the top of plateau areas, where farmers have tried dry farming — all are small and insignificant when compared to the expanse of the desert.

Only the man on the ground, especially the earlier traveler who must measure the distances step by step and foot by foot, could fully know the character of this country. He learned early that he must travel during the fall and winter. If the trip were to be of any length, he usually started in late October or November. During the summer months, travel must be from late afternoon to mid-forenoon, with some shelter from the sun during the mid-day. Water a man could carry, but shelter from the sun he must also have, both for himself and his animals.

In this land of little rainfall, all life, plant and animal, was forced to make adaptation. Plants developed extensive and deep root systems, even a storage system as in the barrel cactus. The evaporation area was restricted to fewer and smaller leaves, and these had water-saving devices. For example, the cactus spines are encased in a cellophane cover, yucca and Joshua blades are similarly fitted with a transparent, waxy sheath. Chaparral leaves are covered with a gummy, sticky substance, as though they had been dipped in glue, while some other desert plants hold their moisture by a fuzz or velvet. Annual plants spring up as if by magic following the brief winter rains, and for a few weeks fill the air with color and perfume, and then are as quickly gone, scorched to a crisp by the burning sun.

Animals as well have made adaptations to conserve their water or to get along on a minimum. The small mammals build underground burrows. All day they remain in these deep, dark holes where the soil temperature and humidity demands no evaporation, coming out to feed only at night. The little kangaroo rat has perhaps made the most perfect adaptation, for it excretes uric acid crystals and reroutes its water supply for use over and over again. In captivity these little animals have lived for six months on only dry seeds without a drop of liquid.

Over the ages the Indians also had to adapt to the rigors of the desert. The size of the tribes was kept small through the laws of natural selection: the old were left to the on the trail or were sometimes led far from the camp and abandoned without food or water. The natives practiced a primitive agriculture, planting small patches of corn and squash along the river bottoms, moving to the mountains during hot weather, and returning to spend the winter in the warm, low areas. They had not developed an adequate storage program, but feasted to excess during the fall months on venison, fruits, and pine nuts until they were all sleek and fat, then built their tepees as snug as they could, avoided strenuous activity, and rationed out their food. Even so, spring always found them emaciated and weak.

For white men, this terrain was a place to get over as soon as possible, certainly not a place in which to live. Before the arrival of the Mormons in the mid-1850's, only a few white men had even been through it. The first was the party of the two Spanish padres, Father Escalante and Father Dominguez, who were trying to find a land route between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Monterey, California. They set out in July, 1776, about the time the colonists on the eastern coast were accepting their new Declaration of Independence. By October of that year they were on the Virgin River opposite the present ghost town of Harrisburg, ready to head back to the south and east. They told of the sulphur springs above the site of Hurricane, and described the broken, colorful terrain. Of the Indian farms along Ash Creek they wrote that they had seen "a well made mat with a large supply of ears and husks of green corn which had been placed upon it. Near it, in the small plain and on the banks of the river were small corn patches with their very well made irrigation ditches. The stalks of maize which they had already harvested this year were still untouched."

Fifty years passed before another white man found his way into this section. In 1826 and again in 1827 Jedediah Strong Smith passed over it, on his way down, over the approximate route of the present U.S. 89 to Clear Creek, crossing to where Cove Fort now stands, and confining to the mouth of the Virgin over the general route of U.S. 91. On his return he followed his trail back to Clear Creek Canyon, but instead of going through, he kept to the west of the range and outlined roughly the present U.S. 91 to the Great Salt Lake. During the next years occasional traders and trappers followed these trails, but it remained for John C. Fremont in 1844 to make careful notes, draw some rough maps, and write a report of the routes of his explorations. These, published, gave impetus throughout the east to people whose faces were already turned westward.

In mid-November, 1847, the leaders in Utah, eager to get seeds, cuttings, and roots from the California settlements and to open up a route for trade, called a group of sixteen men to make the journey. Among them were such frontiersmen as Captain Jefferson Hunt of the Mormon Battalion, O. P. Rockwell, and others. This mounted company with their pack animals followed the dim trails left by Indian traders over the ages, moving with security for miles at a time and then becoming confused by a maze of trails that led in different directions and seemed to end nowhere. They lost their way so many times that they had exhausted their rations before they reached the springs at Las Vegas, and were forced to kill and eat three of their horses.

They arrived at the Williams Ranch on Christmas Eve, and for six weeks traveled and traded in California, returning to Salt Lake Valley on May 15,1848. Their tracks left the trail so well marked that twentyfive of the Mormon Battalion men followed them less than a month later, bringing a band of 135 mules and one wagon — the first to be brought over this route.

On October 2, 1849, a company of Forty-Niners hired Jefferson Hunt to pilot them to California. En route someone produced a map showing a cutoff by which the distance to the gold fields would be lessened by hundreds of miles. In spite of Hunt's remonstrances, one hundred and twenty wagons took the cutoff and only seven remained with him. Some of the wagons turned back after a day or two, others broke a new road back to the Spanish Trail and followed behind the Hunt group, while the fate of those who persisted in staying on the cutoff gave Death Valley its name.

Now that the southern trail was more clearly marked, Brigham Young and the Council sent Parley P. Pratt with fifty young men south this same fall for the purpose of looking out sites for future towns. They kept a careful record of each day's travel, of the distance and the nature of the terrain. Near the Little Salt Lake they left their wagons and a part of their company while twenty men rode horseback to the rim of the basin. Standing on a promontory where the earth fell away and stretched to dim horizons, Pratt studied the landscape. For the record he wrote:

The great Wasatch range . . . here terminates in several abrupt promontories, the country southward opening to the view for at least 80 .miles, and showing no signs of water or fertility ... but a wide expanse of chaotic matter presented itself consisting of huge hills, sandy deserts, cheerless, grassless plains, perpendicular rocks, loose barren clay, dissolving beds of sandstone . . . lying in inconceivable confusion, in short a country in ruins dissolved by the peltings of the storms of the ages and turned inside out, upside down, by terrible convulsions in some former age.

Today's traveler, viewing the scene from the slopes of the Pine Valley Mountain or from the Finger Bluffs of the Kolob Plateau, or the edge of the cliff at Project Smart or any other point of vantage may read this description aloud and marvel at its accuracy. He may mark some pipings of green along the seams, some bits like the tip of a green handkerchief tucked into a gigantic fold, but the over-all impression is of irregular formations, of violent color, space, and silence.

Flat and shimmering under the full sun, the whole land is transformed by a miracle at sunset. Daily different, a paean of color opens in the west, of red and saffron, orange and gold, the exhultant chords echoing from eastern ridges and peaks. Under its magic barren sands and sterile gullies know a moment of glory so poignant that the traveler is left breathless, almost hurt. Soon the notes re-combine and come to rest in quiet tones of mauve and green and blue, as the evening star, luminous and low, brings the benediction of the night.

The desert joshua silhouetted against a sunset sky. This land is one to which one should return again and again, for no one can ever wholly see it, so responsive and sensitive is it to the hours and the seasons.

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