Pack train in Blanding, outfitting point for trips into Natural Bridges. USHS collections.
Blanding: The Making of a Community BY GARY L .
SHUMWAY
I N THE EARLY SPRING OF 1905 young Albert R. Lyman stood near where the Parley Redd Merc is and watched a herd of mustangs emerge from the trees that then covered the land. Breaking into a spirited lope as they started down the hill where the high school now is, they followed the draw toward the southeast, crossed it near the Utah Navajo Development Council offices, and disappeared into the taller sagebrush covering a large Anasazi ruin where my parents later built their home. That moment—when this land still belonged to such free spirits—is not really separated so long from this moment in time, yet this day and that are separated by a long series of experiences, each destined in an inexorable way to turn a sagebrush flat possessed by wild horses into a thriving community with a red stoplight in its navel. Dr. Shumway is professor of history at California State University, Fullerton. A version of this p a p e r was presented at the Twenty-seventh Annual Meeting of the U t a h State Historical Society a t Blanding, U t a h , in September 1979,
