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Nine Mile: Eastern Utah's Forgotten Road
Nine Mile: Eastern Utah's Forgotten Road
BY EDWARD A. GEARY
IN AREA UTAH IS ALMOST EQUALLY DIVIDED between the Great Basin on the west and north and the Colorado Plateau on the east and south. However, the state's population and its best-known history are concentrated in the Great Basin half. Except for the Virgin River Valley, the Colorado Plateau was late to be settled, difficult to develop because of its terrain, and generally held in small esteem, as was indicated in the 1861 report on the Uinta Basin which termed it a "vast contiguity of waste . . . valueless excepting for nomadic purposes, hunting grounds for Indians and to hold the world together."
One important reason for the little understanding or appreciation of eastern Utah in the early days was the difficulty of access. A continuous mountain barrier separates eastern and western Utah, with very few natural passes. The Dominguez-Escalante party crossed through Strawberry Valley and Diamond Fork, which has never developed into a through route, later travelers having preferred the Daniels Summit route out of Strawberry Valley. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century the most important route across the region was the Old Spanish Trail, which crossed Salina Pass. The Rio Grande Railway, after first looking at Salina Canyon, chose the Midland Trail over Soldier Summit. These three passes, Daniels, Soldier Summit, and Salina, remain the only feasible year-round routes, with the addition of the route over Fishlake Pass from Richfield to the Fremont River Valley. South of that point, the rugged canyon country makes a through road virtually impossible, as the Hole-in-the-Rock party discovered a century ago.
Within the province of eastern Utah, too, the historic routes remain important today: the Escalante and the Gunnison crossings of the Green River and the Spanish Valley route to the San Juan country. But there is one road, very important in the development of eastern Utah, that has fallen into near obscurity and disuse: the route between Price and Fort Duchesne, which for some twenty years was probably the most heavily traveled wagon road in eastern Utah and was aptly termed the "Lifeline of Uinta Basin."
The key segment of this road ran through Nine Mile Canyon, one of the most colorful and little-known areas in Utah. Nine Mile does not quite belong to any of the state's usually recognized regions. From Castle Valley, the West Tavaputs Plateau forms the northern skyline, and the usual perception is that the Uinta Basin lies on the other side. From the Basin, on the other hand, the southern vista is of dry benches terminating in the Bad Land Cliffs. But between those landmarks there lies a long east-west canyon that straddles the Carbon-Duchesne county line and belongs really to neither valley. The canyon heads at about 8,000 feet on the West Tavaputs Plateau and drains into the Green River at an elevation of 4,610 feet. The settled portion lies at about the same elevation as the Uinta Basin and Castle Valley, but the landscape more nearly resembles that of the southern Utah canyonlands with its vivid contrast of castellated cliffs and bright green fields on the canyon floor. The climate, too, is considerably milder than that of the Uinta Basin. The reasons for this seem to be primarily the air drainage provided by the canyon and perhaps also the tendency of the south-facing cliffs to hold the sun's warmth in the winter. In any case, old-timers in Nine Mile brag that they can raise fruits that would be impossible to raise in the Basin.
The Nine Mile region is rich in prehistorical interest. It was an important center of the Fremont Culture and has numerous petroglyphs and ruins that have been the object of archaeological investigations since the 1890s. The canyon was apparently a route for trappers and Mexican slave traders as well as Indians. There is a possible Spanish inscription at the mouth of one side canyon, together with a date that may be 1819 but has also been read as 1839 and 1879.
Human occupation goes way back in Nine Mile, then, but it is difficult to determine just when the region first became known to the white settlers of Utah. The 1866 General Land Office map of Utah shows a stream labeled White River in the approximate location of Nine Mile. The Price River was originally named the White River (as one of its tributaries still is), but the 1866 map also shows (though it does not label) the Price River in its approximately correct location. More precise mapping of eastern Utah awaited the Powell surveys beginning in 1869. The earliest known reference to the name Nine Mile is found in the profile map appended to Powell's Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries (1875). In the 1878 Powell volume on the arid lands, A. H. Thompson gives a good though brief description of the canyon but calls the creek the Minnie Maud.' The 1878 U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey map adopts the same name for the creek but shows Nine Mile Valley as the upper portion of the south fork of the Minnie Maud.
Thus, from the earliest reports occurs the confusion of names that has persisted to the present. The canyon, as far as current research can tell, has usually been called Nine Mile, but the creek has more often been known as the Minnie Maud. The 1950 Rand McNally standard map of Utah adds another element to the confusion by identifying an " Mile Creek" between Nine Mile Valley and Minnie Maud Creek. The 1976 USGS map reverses the names, making the main creek Nine Mile and the south fork the Minnie Maud. This is apparently the official designation now, as a result of efforts to clarify water rights on the creek.
The existence of two names for the same creek and canyon has led to numerous folk etymologies. One story has it that Minnie and Maud were sisters who lived in the upper part of the canyon. (There are two similarly shaped hills near the confluence of two upper tributaries that are referred to as Minnie and Maud.) Another view holds that the name has an Indian origin, and it is sometimes spelled as one word, Minnemaud. The name Nine Mile poses problems because it is difficult to find a distinct stretch of the canyon that is nine miles long. One story from Carbon County claims that an early traveler, on asking how far he had to go, received the reply, "About nine mile." Another folk account, this one from Duchesne, has it that the name does not refer to distance at all but rather to the Miles family with its seven daughters, thus, with the parents, "the nine Mileses." However, the region was called Nine Mile long before the Miles family arrived. Howard Price suggests that the name Nine Mile might have come from the nine-mile triangulation used by Powell's surveyor, and that Powell might have had a niece named Minnie Maud. It is clear at any rate that both names were used by the Powell party.
If the names in Nine Mile are confusing and sometimes contradictory, it is equally difficult to determine when the first white settlement of the canyon occurred. No doubt cattle herds ranged through the area in the 1870s, as they did throughout eastern Utah. The Midland Trail, which was a well-established route by the late 1860s, passed within two miles of the canyon; and the Price River settlers, who came by this route, would likely have known of its existence in 1878. However, the 1878 USGS map does not show even a trail running through the canyon. Mildred Dillman claims that the first settlers came into Nine Mile "long before 1880" but does not specify a year. The earliest names associated with Nine Mile and the West Tavaputs Plateau in the local histories are those of George Whitmore and Shedrach Lunt, who had established ranches in the area, though not in Nine Mile Canyon itself, by 1880.
It seems doubtful that settlers came into Nine Mile before the building of the road in the fall of 1886. At any rate, this marked the beginning of Nine Mile's real importance in the development of eastern Utah. The Nine Mile route provides the lowest elevation entry point into the Uinta Basin from the rest of Utah. However, the first settlers in the Basin, in the Ashley Valley area, entered by the much higher Strawberry Valley route, and for the first decade this long and often impassable trail remained their chief supply line. The U.S. Army hacked out a wagon road through the Uinta Mountains to Carter, Wyoming, in about 1882 to supply Fort Thornburgh. With the establishment of Fort Duchesne in August 1886 this route was used for supplies at first but was clearly not satisfactory. The Salt Lake Tribune reported in a dispatch from Fort Bridger that
This was about forty miles farther and almost 2,000 feet higher than the Nine Mile route to the railroad at Price, a fact that must have impressed itself on the military leaders, since the Tribune of October 8, 1886, reported the return of Fort Douglas troops to their post after constructing "a first-class roadway from Price's Station to Fort Duchesne."
According to a family tradition, John A. Powell, one of the early settlers of Price, assisted the army in locating the route through Gate Canyon and Nine Mile. This would indicate that there was not an established road before that time. However, Henry Fiack, one of the original soldiers at Fort Duchesne, wrote of "making the road to Price passable," which could suggest that they improved an earlier road.
It rapidly became a well-traveled way after that time. In April 1887 work was begun on a telegraph line that was completed in August. According to Henry Fiack, the line was no sooner constructed than
In July the Tribune published a dispatch from Price arguing that
The same dispatch reported,
Two million pounds would represent more than 220 trips for a two-wagon outfit, if one accepts Evelyn Richardson's estimate of 9,000 pounds as the maximum capacity. At an average of fifteen days per trip, that means more than 3,300 man-days on the road for this contract alone. The "low figure" of $1.12 per hundred represents an income of $22,400 for the contractor and teamsters. These figures take on added significance when one considers that the population of Price was less than 500 at that time. Clearly, the freight business had a heavy impact. Indeed, it was probably the chief factor in establishing Price as a commercial center for the region.
The "first-class roadway" evidently left something to be desired because the Tribune reported in September 1887 that troops from Fort Douglas were again working on the road. One of the soldiers wrote, "There are quite a few travel this road, to different mines, the Fort, Ashley and surrounding country. . . ," Thus, in its first year the Nine Mile road had clearly established itself as the main route to and from the Uinta Basin. A twice-weekly stage line was established in 1888 to carry passengers and mail, and this became a daily service in 1889. Also in 1889 the first gilsonite mines were opened in the Basin, enabling the freighters to haul a full load both ways. The Price Eastern Utah Telegraph reported in its first issue that 1,618,407 pounds of freight had been shipped to Price on the railroad in the single month of December 1890. The following week the Telegraph reported, "Half a million of gilsonite has been shipped from this point in the last eight days."
In light of the strong strain of boosterism that characterized the rural press in those days, it is doubtful that these are typical figures, but clearly the freight traffic to and from the Uinta Basin was heavy — perhaps an average of fifty trips per week, each way. Considering that the round trip took two weeks or more, that means there were about a hundred teamsters on the road at a time. The army constructed a warehouse in Price and stationed a quartermaster there to receive incoming freight. A large campground developed that was for several years a prominent feature of Price, where teamsters waited for their wagons to be loaded. There is further evidence of the activity on the freight road in the numbers of freighters cited in local histories. Richardson includes thirty-one names in an admittedly incomplete list of teamsters from the Vernal area. Arthur E. Gibson, writing of early Carbon County, says,
In addition, the Indian agencies had their own outfits and hauled a large portion of their own freight with Indian teamsters.
Normally, the individual teamsters did not deal directly with the army or the Gilson Asphaltum Company. Instead, merchants in Price and Vernal would contract for the transportation of goods and then subcontract to individual freighters at the usual rate of one dollar per hundred pounds, sometimes in cash but more often in merchandise, or "calico pay." Theoretically, a freighter with a good outfit and a full load both ways could make as much as ninety dollars per week on the freight road. In practice it is unlikely that anyone approached that income because of the irregularity of shipments, the uncertainties of the weather, which could sometimes make the trip take twice as long as normal, and the expenses of maintaining the teams and equipment. Moreover, the freighter was liable to deductions if there were any loss or damage to the goods, and sometimes the teamsters felt that they were shortchanged by different methods of calculating weights at different ends of the route.
On the other hand, there were sometimes opportunities to make extra money. My grandfather, who drove on the freight road throughout the 1890s, recalled a trip in 1897 when the agent at Ouray offered him twice the usual rate — and in gold — if he would haul a load of wool to Price in one of his wagons instead of gilsonite. Grandpa used his windfall to finance an excursion to the Pioneer Jubilee celebration in Salt Lake City later that summer.
All in all, the freight road made an important economic contribution to the development of eastern Utah, especially in the depression years of the 1890s when money was scarce. Price benefited the most from this economic infusion, a fact that led to some envy in Vernal, which was a larger community than Price throughout the freight road years. The rivalry between the two towns is apparent in this early comment in the Uintah Pappoose:
Although Price and Vernal were rivals for the role of metropolis of eastern Utah, they were by no means near neighbors. The distance between them via Nine Mile is about 120 miles, or almost as great as the distance from Price to Salt Lake City. Moreover, the road, despite the periodic labor of the soldiers, was notoriously bad. The most hazardous stretches lay in the higher elevations of Soldier Canyon and in Gate Canyon, which was subject to flash floods. Some teamsters claimed that they had to walk beside their teams in Soldier Canyon during wet weather to hold them on the road. In December 1891 the Eastern Utah Telegraph reported,
Though the low-elevation pass was usually free from heavy snow, there were occasional storms so heavy that the troops from Fort Duchesne had to be called out to clear away the drifts. In one such storm, in 1891, the stage was stranded for an entire week before a rescue party could reach it. But even in the best weather it was a difficult trip. As Mildred Miles Dillman, herself a Nine Mile native, puts it, "To ride on the stage with its swinging seat of buckskin over that road was an experience not to be duplicated in many other places in the world and, thank heaven, not very often."
The teamsters who traveled the route regularly became well acquainted with one another, and a fellowship of the road developed as they helped each other repair broken wagons or doubled up their teams to pull exceptionally heavy loads up Gate Canyon. My grandfather remembered one bitterly cold trip when he came close to freezing to death after sitting on the wagon seat all day. At the night's camp, one of the other freighters recognized the dangerous state he had reached and forced him to run around the camp until his body heat was restored. Besides the regular freighters there were also drifters along the road, men close to the edge of the law. (Nine Mile is the easiest route between the outlaw havens at Brown's Park and Robbers' Roost; old-time residents remembered being awakened in the night by herds of stolen horses being driven through the canyon.) My grandfather recorded an incident in which he suffered an attack of asthma that made him unable to care for his horses, and a young man "with questionable reputation" called "Six-Shooter Bob" offered to drive the team to Price.
The settlement of Nine Mile Canyon developed along with the freight road, which provided a supplementary income for many of the residents. Nine Mile has never had a townsite, or a permanent community center, or a ward or branch of the LDS church (which must make it almost unique among Utah communities), though it was, and still is, very much a community. Ranches were scattered along thirty miles of the canyon. The logical center point was William Brock's ranch at the mouth of Gate Canyon. When the telegraph line was built, a relay station was established there and manned by soldiers from the fort. It was the last campground with good water before the long two-day pull to the Duchesne River, and so the freighters usually camped under the cliffs there. Brock must have been one of the first ranchers to settle in Nine Mile, but his career was a short one as he killed a man named Foote in a dispute and had to flee the country. His place was taken by Pete Francis, who operated a saloon (which still stands, as does the telegraph station) and built a twenty-room hotel. But Francis was also caught in the recurring violence of Nine Mile history, dying in a brawl in his saloon. Shortly thereafter, in 1902, Preston Nutter purchased the Brock ranch from Francis's widow and made it the headquarters of his far-flung operations. Nutter was not interested in being an innkeeper. He closed the saloon and converted the hotel into a bunkhouse. He kept the peacock he inherited from Pete Francis, however, and found a mate for it, thereby starting the flock of peafowl that remains one of the distinctive features of Nine Mile.
The Brock precinct is listed with a population of 50 in the 1890 census. In 1900 the precinct, now called Minnie Maud, had a population of 121. Shortly thereafter, the post office was moved from Brock's to Frank Alger's ranch, a couple of miles up the canyon. Alger also drove the stage and operated a small store, and his place became the center of activity in the canyon for a time. In 1905 the name of the precinct and post office was changed to Harper, and the 1910 census showed the population at its high point of 130. The precinct center remained quite movable. The rock house of E. L. Harmon was the main stage stop for a time, and there was a schoolhouse nearby. The last stage stop was the Ed Lee ranch, where the log hotel still stands and the names of the horses can still be seen over the harness pegs in the old barn.
The stage line had stations spaced about twenty miles apart along the route, and the freighters tended to camp at the same locations since twenty miles was a good day's travel for their teams. From Price the road went over the foothills to the mouth of Soldier Canyon. The first stopping place was Soldier Station. The second night, for the freighters, was spent in the upper reaches of Nine Mile Canyon. The stage evidently made its second stop in the middle reaches of the canyon at the stations mentioned. The third stage stop, and in some ways the most interesting, was at Smith's Wells in the waterless stretch of the southern Uinta Basin. Here Owen Smith dug a deep well for water and built a hotel and other buildings from the native rock. The next stop and campground was at Bridges (present-day Myton) on the Duchesne River. From there it was one stage farther to Fort Duchesne, and there was another stage stop and campground between the fort and Vernal.
Over this route, then, passed the great bulk of the freight, passenger, and mail traffic to and from the Uinta Basin for many years. In 1905 the Uintah Railway was opened from Mack, Colorado, to Dragon, Utah, and this took most of the gilsonite shipments. This loss of traffic was more than offset by the opening of the Indian reservation to settlement in the same year. The majority of homesteaders came by the Nine Mile route as did the supplies to maintain them. The agricultural products of the Basin continued to be carried to market on this road as well, including the large quantities of alfalfa seed produced in those years. The Uintah Railway attempted to capture the mail and passenger traffic in 1910, but Nine Mile held its own. The Vernal Express of May 27, 1910, reported,
In the end, it was not the railroad that brought the eclipse of the Nine Mile road (the Uintah Railway itself ceased operation after a few years), but alternative wagon and automobile routes. The higher but shorter route from Castle Gate to Duchesne over Indian Canyon was improved in 1919-20, and the mail was carried by that route until 1934 when the Daniels Canyon route, with its more direct connections to the state's population centers, finally became the main access to the Uinta Basin. The Nine Mile road has seen little improvement over the years, except for an annual grading in preparation for the deer hunt. There is little traffic today except for ranchers, oil and gas drilling crews, the few tourists who deliberately seek out the interesting features of the region, and the unfortunate few who misunderstand Nine Mile as referring to the distance between Myton and Wellington.
Being off the beaten track has its advantages, however, one of which is the preservation of the landscape. There is perhaps no place in Utah where the atmosphere of the Old West is as clearly felt as in Nine Mile. The cattle ranches remain, still benefiting from the natural grazing drift from the summer range on the West Tavaputs Plateau to the winter range in the lower canyons along the Green River. In Nine Mile, indeed, can be found in microcosm the history of the cattle industry from the 1880s to the present: the early expansion of the herds; the sharp decline about 1910 as a result of competition from sheep herds on the Plateau; the sharper decline in the early 1920s with the collapse of the beef market; and the continuing adjustments and consolidation to the present. There are fewer operators today, and far fewer year-round residents, but in the Preston Nutter Corporation there is still a direct link to the great era of cattle ranching in the West. Another link to the Old West can be found in the name of Art Acord, daubed on the rock wall near the Nutter ranch. Acord came to Nine Mile as a runaway boy of about twelve and worked for Nutter until he drove a herd of horses off a cliff. From that inauspicious beginning, he went on to become a championship cowboy and performer in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and later a silent film cowboy star.
Many of the ranch houses and outbuildings still remain, though in decay, defining by their intervals the scale of life of an earlier period, and the old shade trees and orchards mark the oases where the teamsters on the freight road found refreshment. The stone Harmon house raises interesting conjectures about architectural influences, as it seems to resemble a European cottage more than the usual folk architecture of early Utah. The Miles-Pace ranch in the lower part of the canyon is almost a museum of ranch life, with its clustered sheds and bunkhouses, its stone ranch house, its cellar built into the canyon wall, and its spectacular setting surrounded by high, vertical cliffs. Traces of the old road remain in the bottom of Gate Canyon, and all along the way there are names and dates written in axle grease on the rocks by teamsters. The iron telegraph poles, erected in 1890-95 to replace the original wooden poles, still march down the canyon carrying the single telephone line. Cattle still graze as they have done for a century in the fields, and the wild black currant bushes grow abundantly along the fence lines, their tart fruit in midsummer coated lightly from the dust of occasional vehicles that pass where once the six-horse teams pulled their heavy loads along eastern Utah's forgotten road.
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