Utah Writ Small: Challenge and Change in Kane County's Past BY D E A N L. M A Y
Kanab, the county seat of Kane County, in the late 1940s. Large building at left is the high school. USHS collections.
r EW VISITORS TO UTAH'S REMOTE KANE COUNTY have come away unmoved. Among many memorable descriptions of that landscape was one offered by Wallace Stegner in 1942: T h e tiny oases huddle in their pockets in the rock, surrounded on all sides by as terrible and beautiful wasteland as the world can show, colored every color of the spectrum even to blue and green, sculptured by sandblast winds, fretted by meandering lines of cliffs hundreds of miles long and often several thousand feet high, carved and broken and split by canyons so deep and narrow that the rivers run in sunless Dr. May is associate professor of history at the University of Utah and a member of the Board of State History. This paper was presented at Utah's eighty-eighth Statehood Day celebration in Kanab January 4, 1984. T h e author wishes to thank Adonis Findlay Robinson whose History of Kane County provided much material important to his interpretation. Especially helpful in providing research materials and documents were Gregory Thompson and the staff of the Western Americana collection of University of Utah's Marriott Library — particularly Roy Webb and Walter R. Jones — and James L. Kimball, Jr., and staff of the LDS Church Historical Department.
