The Blue Dugway

The Blue Dugway

By Dwight L. King

WHEN I WAS A CHILD LIVING IN Teasdale in Wayne County, the road that led from Rabbit Valley to Caineville provided the only way for settlers in Caineville to receive supplies and was the only link between the town of Caineville and the outside world.

The road was primitive, ungraded, fit only for use by freight wagons of the Conestoga type, or buggies, or men on saddle horses. It passed through what is now the Capitol Reef National Park, down the bottom of a deep gully called Capitol Wash where the ledges were straight up from each side of the road and there was barely room for a wagon to pass along the bottom of the dry wash. After the road came out of the Waterpocket Fold at the bottom of Capitol Wash, it wound through a blue clay country where there stood a series of reef formations with a cap rock of sandstone and dark blue clay for a base.

About two or three miles before the road reached Caineville, it passed along the face of a blue clay reef under the sandstone cap rock.

The narrow road was called the Blue Dugway. The Blue Dugway passed along the northwest slope of the face of the reef. In the winter snow melted last from the slope, and during the summer the rainstorms dried last from along the Blue Dugway.

Anyone who has ever traveled over blue clay knows that when it's wet its consistency is that of gumbo — slick, slippery, and sticky. The horses pulling the freight wagons bringing supplies to Caineville during all of the winter and in the summer on rainy days traversed the area with great difficulty and often fell and slid off the road or were injured as they attempted to pull the heavy freight wagons around the Blue Dugway.

On the left-hand side of the Blue Dugway, the hill sloped precipitously for several hundred feet. On the right-hand side, it sloped to the sandstone cap rock. There was no room for freighters to turn around, stop, or make any kind of an adjustment once they started up or down the Blue Dugway. On cloudy, rainy days it was dismal. The dark blue clay and overcast sky blended to make it seem a hellish place.

Many of the people who lived in Wayne County made a living freighting supplies, carrying mail, or passengers from Rabbit Valley to Caineville. Many of the teamsters were also the Sunday School teachers. A favorite story told to the Primary and Sunday School children was one involving the Blue Dugway.

The story went that a teamster on a dark and dreary day, overcast and stormy, had started down the Blue Dugway when suddenly there appeared before him, in front of his team, the devil himself, with his tail twitching, his eyes sparkling, the hair on his face standing erect, breathing venom and hatred. As he stood in the road, blocking any possibility of passing, he issued a challenge to the teamster to do battle, to fight to the death. The response that always caused Satan to give a scream of rage and disappear in a cloud of smoke was that battle would be done with one thing only — the Book of Mormon, which the teamster pulled from his grub box and waved in Satan's face.

Versions of this story were often told with embellishments calculated to scare the children into being good. They reached a state of such horribly descriptive detail that many of the children were haunted by nightmares and afraid to enter any darkened room without adult accompaniment. Finally, orders were issued by church leaders that this story was no longer to be used or told in the Primary and Sunday School classes.