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Conquering the Black Ridge
Conquering the Black Ridge
The Communitarian Road in Pioneer Utah
By Todd Compton
The Black Ridge—a formation of jagged volcanic rock that fills Ash Creek Canyon for some three miles north of Pintura in Washington County, Utah—was one of the legendary barriers that made traveling to and from Southern Utah’s “Dixie” difficult, if not impossible. 1 Crossing the ridge became almost a rite of passage for the region’s pioneers, as evidenced by several accounts of Dixie’s settlement. Maureen Whipple’s great Mormon novel, The Giant Joshua (1942), opens with a company of pioneers struggling to navigate the Black Ridge. Likewise, George Hicks, one of the early settlers of Washington, wrote a poem on life in Dixie that highlights the geological formation:
Indeed, the Black Ridge was punishing for wagons, which often broke down there and somehow had to be repaired on location. A long stretch of sand, another barrier dreaded by the pioneers, followed the fearsome ridge. Hicks continued:
This difficult route was necessary because it served as a lifeline between southern Utah and the rest of the state. The first town south of the Black Ridge was Santa Clara, founded in late 1854 on the Santa Clara River. The road closest to it was the Spanish or California Trail, which passed through Mountain Meadows and continued southwest past Santa Clara, avoiding Ash Creek Canyon. 4 However, after Mormon settlers established Washington, Toquerville, and St. George (in 1857, 1858, and 1861, respectively), creating a usable road over the Black Ridge became a high priority because they needed a direct route to Dixie. It was relatively easy to traverse the Ash Creek Canyon by horseback or on foot, following Indian trails. Bringing wagons and other vehicles by that route, however, was almost impossible without a workable road, and wagons were crucial to pioneers and the freighters who brought necessary supplies—including food—to pioneer communities. Creating the road over the Black Ridge represented a monumental task, which tried the dedication, ingenuity, and will of the settlers of Dixie. Their conquest of the Black Ridge became a major communitarian accomplishment in southern Utah, as local Latter-day Saints contributed tithing and tax work hours toward its building and upkeep. 5 In addition, they were supported by financial allocations from the government of Utah.
Indian trails had passed by the Black Ridge, and the earliest whites who traversed Ash Creek Canyon undoubtedly followed these. 6 Paiute names for the formation show that it challenged Indians, as it later would whites. According to LaVan Martineau, Paiutes knew the Black Ridge as Kaw’uwhaim Awvee (Ankle Lying) or Too’Yoonuv (Lava Flow). They called the wider area Chuhngkawweep (Rough Land), “due to the roughness of the area caused by the large lava field.” 7 The Black Ridge served as the boundary between the Tave-at-sooks, the Paiutes who lived near modern Kanarraville, on the rim of the Great Basin, and the Toquer-ats, the Paiutes who lived near modern Toquerville, south of the Black Ridge. 8
The Black Ridge canyon enters written history with the 1776 expedition of fathers Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Francisco Atanasio Domínguez. Two Indians led the padres into the canyon on October 13, 1776, after the company had traveled south through the Kanarraville area. They “entered a ridge-cut entirely of black lava rock which lies between two high sierras by way of a gap.” 9 Escalante and Domínguez recognized that this difficult ridge acted as a kind of gateway.
In the roughest part of the canyon, the two Paiute guides suddenly disappeared. “We applauded their cleverness in having brought us through a place so well suited for carrying out their ruse so surely and easily,” Escalante wrote ruefully. The company “continued south for a league with great hardship on account of so much rock,” then descended to Ash Creek and camped in a cottonwood grove. 10 The next day the Spanish explorers passed over stretches of hilly sand. Thus the first historical description of Ash Creek Canyon already depicts its difficulty.
John D. Lee.
utah state historical society
The next white visitor to Ash Creek Canyon might have been Jedediah Smith, as he traveled from the Great Salt Lake to California in the late summers of 1826 and 1827. 11 Unfortunately, he left no detailed descriptions of Ash Creek Canyon.
The Mormons arrived on the scene some twenty years later, in 1849, when the Parley P. Pratt expedition explored southern Utah. Pratt arrived at the modern site of Parowan with his full company, then left his wagons and part of the company there, while he proceeded southward with twenty men on horseback. According to Pratt’s official report, on December 29, the company was “forced to leave the stream [Ash Creek] and take to our right over the hills for many miles. Country rough and marred with huge stones, the North side a foot deep with snow, on the Summit and South side very miry. . . . Night found us encamped on a stream in a rough broken country.” 12 This camp might have been near the site of modern Pintura. 13 Just as the name “ridge” implies a hill of some sort, the Pratt report talks of a summit dividing the north and south sides of a formation.
Intrigued by Pratt’s discovery of iron in southern Utah, Brigham Young soon sent an “Iron Mission” to the area, and this group founded Parowan in January 1851. Later in the year, Mormons expanded southward to Cedar City. In the spring of 1852, they founded the first Fort Harmony, close to modern Ash Creek Reservoir. 14 John D. Lee led Fort Harmony; Peter Shirts was another resident. 15 Both of these resilient frontiersmen would help pioneer the Black Ridge route.
On January 27, 1852, Lee headed a company of twelve men (including John Steele and Zadok Judd), four wagons, and thirteen horses that explored the Virgin and Santa Clara Rivers. 16 As they approached Ash Creek Canyon, Lee wrote, “The country for the next 15 miles appears forbidding being a low range of rocky broken mountains covered with brush and service bushes.” Not far into Ash Creek Canyon, they decided that wagons could not proceed and left them there, with some guards. Another part of the company proceeded onward on foot and with horses. Lee described passing by “low broken sand mounds” and “sand hills.” He thought that his group came near Ash Creek’s conjunction with LaVerkin Creek (where the banks of both creeks were three hundred feet high, in Lee’s estimation); however, this is problematic, because both creeks reach the Virgin at about the same place, near the modern town of LaVerkin. According to Lee, they ascended a “mound” here and saw the Virgin River in the distance. Apparently they now sent back for the wagons and successfully brought them over the Black Ridge, a historic event.
ROADS OVER THE BLACK RIDGE
ROAD / DATES / LOCATION
Hamblin-Judd Road, First used spring 1856, Apparently just west of Ash Creek
Peter Shirts’s Road, Begun December 1856, West of Ash Creek, but near the Pine Valley Mountain foothills
Road west of Ash Creek (sometimes called the Duffin Road), Begun November 1862, West of Ash Creek, possibly following the general Hamblin-Judd route
Road east of Ash Creek (sometimes called the County Road) Arrowhead Highway, June 1868–1924, East of Ash Creek, 1924–1925, West of Ash Creek, following the 1862 Duffin Road
U.S. Highway 91 (formerly Arrowhead Highway) Interstate-15, 1926, West of Ash Creek, Late 1960s / early 1970s–present, West of Ash Creek
Five miles later, Lee and company came to a welcome landmark in the lower Ash Creek Canyon route: “the Grapevines springs.” These springs “boil up” at the foot of a sand mound and “moisten about one acre of land which is completely interlocked with vines,” Lee wrote, adding, prophetically, “Good place to camp.” The area would later become a welcome oasis for travelers who ventured south of the rim. (For example, George A. Smith wrote in 1857: “Our slow progress caused us to suffer for want of water; when we reached the ‘Grapevine’ Springs it was regarded by me as one of the pleasantest spots upon the earth—a little cool water in a desert!”) 17 Lee left the wagons here and with a few men explored the Virgin and Santa Clara rivers.
That summer of 1852, a group of seven men, led by John Calvin Lazelle Smith and John Steele and including John D. Lee, explored east of Parowan in the Sevier Valley. They followed LaVerkin Creek southwest until the terrainforced them to leave the creek, and they eventually came to the convergence of the Virgin River, LaVerkin Creek, and Ash Creek. There Steele and Lee followed their former route north over the Black Ridge. 18
When the members of the Southern Indian mission arrived at the first Fort Harmony on May 2, 1854, a new chapter in Dixie history began, as some of them hoped to proselytize the numerous Paiutes who farmed on the Virgin and Santa Clara rivers in the Dixie basin. In mid-May, Brigham Young and other LDS general authorities visited the Iron Mission and helped to locate and lay out the second Fort Harmony, a few miles northwest of the first Fort Harmony. 19 Young asked the men who had visited Dixie whether “a wagon road could be made across the Black Ridge down to the Rio Virgen.” If this is reported correctly, we see that Young already had an interest in the territory south of Harmony. Those who knew the Black Ridge doubted that such a road could be made: “Their replies were very discouraging.” 20 Despite the fact that Lee had apparently crossed the ridge with wagons in 1852, no recognized road existed there yet.
Peter Shirts.
utah state historical society
However, James Bleak noted that “notwithstanding this report, President [Heber C.] Kimball prophesied that [a] wagon road would be made from Harmony over the Black Ridge.” 21 Thomas Brown’s contemporary report of the LDS hierarchy’s visit does not mention this prophecy. However, if Kimball did say something like this, it would demonstrate that Utahns viewed the idea of a road over the Black Ridge as close to miraculous.
The Indian missionaries soon began exploring the surrounding country. David Lewis, first counselor to Rufus Allen, leader of the missionaries, led a company that included Jacob Hamblin south over the Black Ridge in late May 1854. 22 On the twenty-sixth, “after passing over an unbroken & rocky road down south,” the party “camped on 2 springs of good water—plenty of grapes vines around & called these Grapevine Springs.” 23
On June 7, Rufus Allen led another venture southwards, as recorded in the diaries of Hamblin and, especially, Thomas Brown. Guided by three Indians, the company left the second Fort Harmony, and then crossed Ash Creek near the old fort. Brown wrote,
According to Brown, then, after leaving old Fort Harmony, the group first encountered a long rocky bench or hill, possibly the north face of the Black Ridge. They “struck” Ash Creek again, and then stayed close to the creek while descending “a long steep rocky hill” (possibly the ridge’s south face). A “good level bottom of Ash Creek” followed it. Finally, the group traveled through a stretch of sand and boulders until they came to the area of modern Toquerville. This account, while vague, shows that the Black Ridge included rocky and steep descents and ascents. The company proceeded to visit the Paiute population centers at Toquerville and the Santa Clara, and then returned to Harmony via the California Road. 24
On October 23, 1854, David Lewis led another exploring trip, which included Hamblin, Shirts, and two Paiutes. The company crossed the Black Ridge, and then turned east up the east fork of the Virgin, possibly becoming the earliest explorers of the southern part of modern Zion Park. 25 Lewis’s report of the trip, however, barely mentioned the Black Ridge, for the hazards of that territory were becoming well known.
The next crossing of the Black Ridge occurred in the spring of 1856 and represented an epic accomplishment: a company took wagons from Santa Clara, across the future sites of St. George and Washington, along the Virgin, and then up Ash Creek Canyon. Jacob Hamblin led this company, which included the first known white woman to traverse the ridge, Mary Minerva Judd, the wife of the Mormon Battalion veteran Zadok Knapp Judd. She left three accounts of the experience. 26 Though Hamblin and Mary Judd documented this important pioneering expedition, the event is not well known.
Rufus Allen had sent Hamblin and four other missionaries (Thales Haskell, Ira Hatch, Samuel Knight, and Augustus Hardy) to live among the Paiutes in Santa Clara in early December 1854. In the late summer of the following year, Hamblin brought his and other families from northern Utah to Santa Clara. He also recruited the Zadok and Mary Minerva Judd family to leave Parowan and help him settle Santa Clara. (Zadok was his brother-in-law.)
The Judds arrived at the newly built “Fort Clara” in March 1856. After only a day in this settlement, an express arrived from Harmony with news of an Indian outbreak in northern Utah, and all the missionaries were called back to Harmony. Faced with this directive, the missionaries decided against returning by the California road, which they felt might be snowy and open to Indian attack. Instead, they looked eastward. “Thare was aneu [a new] rout through the Mountains and no snow of onley half the distance but we had allways herd that it was impasable for wagons,” Hamblin wrote. Nevertheless, “We all felt like trying it,” an attitude typical of these pioneers. 27 Even if this route was commonly viewed as “impasable” for wagons, many of these missionaries had crossed the Black Ridge multiple times, on foot or on horse, so they knew Ash Creek Canyon fairly well. Zadok Judd, for instance, trekked through the area with John D. Lee in 1852.
The party—which consisted of four wagons, eight mounted men, Mary Judd, and possibly other women—set out eastward. On the first day after leaving Fort Clara, they traveled five miles and camped at a spring above modern St. George. “There was nothing inviting on the surrounding benches,” Mary wrote, though a plat of grass below the springs provided a welcome variation from the desert landscape. The next day, the horsemen rode ahead while the wagon company “made a wagon track” over a black ridge that lay between modern St. George and Washington. 28 They reached the Virgin River, nooned there, and continued on, camping at some springs that night. On the third day, they ate lunch at a creek with a few cottonwoods and then camped that night on a creek with more cottonwoods—which they named Big and Little Cottonwood creeks. On the next day they passed Grapevine Springs; they must have camped near Ash Creek shortly thereafter. On the fifth day, the company faced the Black Ridge.
“With quite a precipitous ascent of two miles, and covered with boulders of black volcanic rock, interspersed with brush and cedar trees [Utah juniper], it looked impractical for wagons,” wrote Mary. 29 Nevertheless, “Br knite [Samuel Knight] and Colman [Prime Coleman] ^thales hascal^ [rode] a head to serch out the best track for us to follow.” 30 With “great labor,” the missionaries found a route and probably cleared the boulders that were movable out of the way; the hard-pressed oxen then pulled the wagons to the summit. Then the company “passed down its western face a further distance of two miles,” onto Ash Creek. 31
Those members of the party in wagons made camp, but the horsemen rode ahead to Harmony. They returned with news that the women of Harmony were preparing a celebratory meal for this intrepid group of pioneers—a welcome reward after their grueling adventure. Mary Judd was proud of this accomplishment: “We obeyed orders and made the first wagon tracks that there ever was made south of harmony ^over the black ridge.^ We travelled about 75 miles without any wagon track,” she wrote. 32
Zadok Knapp Judd.
daughters of the utah pioneers
Mary Minerva Dart Judd.
daughters of the utah pioneers
According to Hamblin, “We looked out the rout . . . and arived safe in Harmony in 4 Days which surprised some of the Brothren.” 33 Later travelers through Ash Creek Canyon complained freely even when they had a defined, if primitive, road. But the Santa Clara Indian missionaries had brought four wagons over the Black Ridge without a road. They were considerably the worse for the journey. Mary Judd said they “stoped [at Fort Harmony] to fix up as we had torne our close [clothes] terably travling thrue brush and rockes with no road of any kinde.” 34
When Zadok and Mary Judd returned to Santa Clara, traveling with Oscar Hamblin, they surmounted the Black Ridge again. This time they had to navigate the rocky route in a heavy downpour of rain. “This made the ground so slippery that in steep and sliding places, it was difficult to keep our wagons right side up,” Mary wrote. 35 Just so, bad weather often compounded the danger, difficulty, and misery of the Black Ridge passage. 36
John Woodhouse apparently used this same route over the Black Ridge route in the spring of 1857, when Indian difficulties made travelling the California Trail dangerous. “The new route proved very rough,” Woodhouse wrote, “and for six miles over the Black Ridge all the wheels of the wagon could not touch the ground at once.” 37 This is hyperbole, but the Black Ridge demanded hyperbole.
At about this time, Brigham Young was contemplating founding a cotton-growing colony in Dixie. Perhaps in preparation for this outpost, on December 1, 1856, the Iron County Court appointed Peter Shirts to the office of county road commissioner. 38 He had apparently located a road through Ash Creek Canyon near the Pine Valley Mountains on the west and reported to LDS church authorities that its only drawback was a canyon 165 feet deep and a thousand feet across. When asked how he would get by this, Shirts reportedly said, “Leap it.” Though Shirts did excavate a dugway through the canyon, it was so dangerous that travelers often had to lower their wagons by ropes down a sheer cliff and then climb a steep incline on the other side. 39 The site became known as “Peter’s Leap,” and the creek at the bottom of the canyon is still called Leap Creek. 40
Evidently, Peter Shirts did not create the first road through Ash Creek Canyon. According to John Woodhouse, “The road to our Dixie, over the Black Ridge was considered so bad that Brother Peeter Shirts had been appointed to explore a better one.” The road that was “so bad” was apparently the Hamblin-Judd route, which had preceded Shirts’s road. Woodhouse continued, “He [Shirts] explored one nearer the foot of the mountains, and as he expressed it, it had one bad place in it, namely the so called Peeters Leap. But this proved so bad that it more than compensated for all the rest.” 41 In fact, the historian Morris Shirts concluded that Peter Shirts’s road would have easily been the best of all the Black Ridge roads, if Leap Creek Canyon had not interposed a serious barrier to wagons halfway down it. 42
The people who founded Washington in May 1857 had access to Peter’s road, but they did not universally appreciate it. When the “Texas Company”— probably a group of settlers from Texas and other
southern states led by Robert D. Covington—saw Peter’s Leap, they proposed killing Peter Shirts. They made the crossing only by chaining several wagons together, letting “the hind one hold back the front ones.” 43 When Shirts presented a bill for his work at the June 1857 session of the Iron County Court, the court flatly rejected it and accused him of spending money unwisely, causing the county a “total loss” of three hundred dollars. (Presumably this bill went beyond what they had previously authorized.) The county court promptly released Shirts from his road-building duties and appointed John D. Lee and Elisha H. Groves “to locate road to Washington ‘City’ which Peter Shirts late County Road Commissioner laid on the track called Peter’s Leap.” The court apparently appropriated fifty dollars for work on the section of the road south of Grapevine Springs. 44
In subsequent county court records, acts relating to road building appear frequently: the Black Ridge road constantly needed repair, new roads replaced inadequate ones, and other roads soon replaced Peter Shirts’s route. Roads made trade, food supplies, and communication with the outside world available, and they were a major concern for all the early pioneer communities in southern Utah.
In August 1857, the LDS apostle George A. Smith toured the southern Utah communities and used Shirts’s road, as improved by Lee, Groves, and others. In one widely quoted description of the Black Ridge, Smith called the passage “the most desperate piece of road that I ever traveled in my life, the whole ground for miles being covered with stones, volcanic rock, cobble heads . . . and in places, deep sand.” 45 James Martineau, who traveled in the same company, wrote “Went down ‘Peter’s Leap,’ which is a narrow road down the side of a deep gulch about 100 or 200 feet deep, the sides being perpendicular. The wagons were let down by ropes and men holding behind, the wheels sometimes dropping down two or three feet at a time. Got safely down. Stopped at Grape Vine Springs for the night.” 46
Later, in July 1859, Martineau again accompanied Smith on a tour of southern Utah and made a nightmarish crossing of the Black Ridge. Necessity forced the company to use a “balky,” unbroken horse that “tried to run away several times over a very dangerous road—the black ridge.” In addition, it was raining. Though the party left Harmony at nine o’clock in the morning, they made slow progress, due in part to wagon wheels falling apart. They did not reach Washington until eleven p.m. that night and thus had to travel a good portion of their journey in the dark. At times, Martineau had to go in advance of the wagon train and feel on the ground with his hands for the track. 47
The next chapter in the development of the Black Ridge road occurred several months later. The March 1860 Iron County Court actions note the approval of a bill for $297, paid to Thomas W. Smith (acting as supervisor), Samuel Pollock, and John D. Lee for labor on the Black Ridge road. Further, “provision was made for the expenditure of an Appropriation made by the Legislature on the 20th of January, 1860 for road on the Black Ridge.” 48 Then, on May 30, 1861, Brigham Young and an entourage of twenty-three carriages and sixty-four people traveled the Black Ridge road, going north. 49 Apparently, Smith, Pollock, and Lee had built a usable road. At the same time, this trip would have given Young a clear idea of how rough it was to cross the ridge.
Another major wave of pioneers passed through Ash Creek Canyon in late 1861, as Young sent three hundred households south to found St. George. One of these pioneers, Hugh Moon, seemed to portray the pioneers using the Hamblin-Judd road, close to Ash Creek. 50 After passing the first Fort Harmony, the Moon company camped on Ash Creek. On November 30, the group crossed the creek “and struck the black Ridge which is about 3 mile of very rough road, nothing but rocks. We crossed Ash Creek 5 times, crossed the south fork and Ash Creek and camped.” The next day, he noted,
Moon then turned to overstatement:
After the twist, they faced two miles of sand, which sometimes reached ten inches in depth, and then came to Grapevine Springs. Marveling at the local sights—cacti and yuccas, “black nasty rocks that looked as if the Lord had made them for nothing but to bluff off our enemies and spoil the land,” and mountains of sandstone—they continued on and camped at the first Cottonwood Creek. 51
As Moon’s account demonstrates, the pioneers sometimes personalized their descriptions of the Black Ridge country, viewing it as a conscious, malignant stretch of land. In fact, it did seem to have a vindictive streak. When a Swiss company passed it on their way to Santa Clara, the group’s trumpeter, George Staheli, carefully tied his cornet to the top of his wagon to protect it from harm. It somehow came loose (probably because of the wagon’s constant rattling), fell under wagon wheels, and was smashed flat. 52
One 1861 company “journeyed to Ash Creek, which they crossed, and climbed the very steep road over the black volcanic ridge, on the right [west] bank of Ash Creek. After descending, they arrived at the forks of the road.” Some accounts, such as this one, seem to locate the Black Ridge just west of Ash Creek. This was apparently the Hamblin-Judd route. 53 But travelers were still using Peter Shirts’s road and crossing in late 1861. Mary Ann Mansfield Bentley, one of the settlers of St. George, described crossing Peter’s Leap, unloading wagons, taking them apart, and then lowering them a piece at a time down the cliff. 54 John D. Lee apparently used this route, as he reported wagon breakdowns near “Iron Mountain” and the Pine Mountain foothills, between Washington and Harmony, in 1858 and 1859. 55
Clearly, complaints about the Black Ridge road continued unabated, and in 1862, Brigham Young and the local LDS apostle, Erastus Snow, directed that a new road should be built. 56 Snow appointed three men, Charles Stapley Jr., Robert Lloyd, and Daniel D. McArthur, as road commissioners. On November 27, Apostle Snow traveled with the three commissioners from St. George to Harmony “and located the road . . . by way of the West side of Ash Creek, over the high volcanic ridge.” 57 The road they located might have roughly followed the Hamblin-Judd route; but now, what had been nothing more than a wagon track would become a smoothed road. Accordingly, in November 1862, southern Utahns began building a road west of Ash Creek known sometimes as the Duffin Road, after Isaac Duffin, appointed superintendant of construction in 1863. 58
The pioneer photographer William H. Jackson crossed the Black Ridge using this road on January 8, 1867, and wrote, “Road very rough over the ascending part, consisting mostly of a good dug way. Very rock[y], alternating with deep sand.” Even though the Black Ridge was rough, rocky, and sandy, Jackson viewed the new road as good. 59
The people of Dixie built this road as a communitarian project, just like a public building or an irrigation ditch. All roads in southern Utah were built this way, but the Black Ridge road was simply the most difficult road to create and keep in working condition. In 1862, as the new pioneers began to settle in Dixie, Snow made sure they understood and would support the concept of “labor tithing.” (As southern pioneers often had no hard money, they could pay tithing, taxes, or assessments by communal work, including working on roads.) 60 Church leaders required all settlements in southern Utah to contribute money or labor or both to the effort, even though some of the towns, such as Cedar City, did not depend directly on the road. 61 The county court judged a ten-hour day’s work on a road to be the equivalent of a two-dollar poll tax. 62 Southern Utahns also received funds for road building from the territorial legislature at times.
However, it was not easy to maintain the Duffin Road, and it became “almost impassable.” 63 Therefore, at an LDS conference held on November 1, 1866, Snow proposed making a new road—now on the east side of Ash Creek. (The fact that the Dixie saints kept moving the road to either side of Ash Creek shows that the Black Ridge continued to baffle them. Each time they laid out a new road, it required a monumental expenditure of money and human effort.) They received an allotment from the territorial legislature and set to work. 64 On June 29, 1868, Snow wrote to Brigham Young, “Work upon the Black Ridge Road is being prosecuted to completion.” 65 Travelers began using the road—which was sometimes known as the County Road—that same month, though it was still incomplete. 66 In 1868, the legislature spent $4,551 on this road, a substantial sum for that place and time. 67
In 1870, the photographer Charles Savage, traveling to Dixie with President Young, expressed his appreciation for the new road: “A magnificent road has been made down Ash Creek avoiding the black ridge costing an immense amount of cash and labor, we soon reached Bellevue, thence on over sand and rocks to Harrisburg.” 68 Morris Shirts referred to the 1868 road as “a model of early pioneer roadbuilding. It was the first attempt at establishing ‘sensible grades.’ Equipment other than picks and shovels was used. The road was built to last, and was constantly improved.” 69 Indeed, the 1868 “County Road” would serve southern Utah for the next fifty-six years.
Kumen Jones driving a carriage on the road east of Ash Creek, 1898.
gerald r. sherratt library
Despite Savage’s enthusiasm, the County Road was still very rough and required navigating a dugway down cliffs with heart-stopping drop-offs. In late 1872, Elizabeth Wood Kane and her husband Thomas Kane traveled to St. George with Brigham Young. Elizabeth memorably described the hair-raising descent through Ash Creek Canyon in Twelve Mormon Homes. 70 “We were told to prepare for eighteen miles of rough road when we left Kannarra,” she wrote, “and we certainly encountered them. We were fairly in the rocks, and the lava blocks are the flintiest stones I ever heard ring against horse-shoe and wheel-tire.” The line of carriages came to “a great sloping down or moorland, sparsely studded with yuccas,” and Elizabeth relaxed as the road ahead looked entirely uninteresting.
Then the carriage ahead of the Kanes stopped, and its driver came back to the Kanes with a message from Young: “Please watch yon crack, Mrs. Kane.” The plain seemed to have “a fold or wrinkle in it,” and Elizabeth watched it out of politeness. Then she saw that it was “a crack in the earth” and the road was running toward it. “A few minutes more, and we are winding down a narrow road painfully excavated along the side of what I now see to be a chasm, sheer down which I can look hundreds of feet—and I much prefer not looking!” she wrote. But teased by her husband and children, she gazed down in “fascinated terror.” Far below was a tiny stream, Ash Creek. “We wind in and out of the corners of the great chasm, making short half-turns,” Elizabeth wrote. When they reached the bottom, the Mormons told the Kanes that they had descended a thousand feet.
The Kanes stayed the night at one of Elizabeth’s “twelve Mormon homes” in Bellevue (modern Pintura), which had been founded as a town in 1868. 71 Bellevue was the first town south of the rim, and it would become a welcome stopping place after travelers braved the Black Ridge dugway.
Elizabeth Kane, circa 1872.
harold b. lee library
Angus Cannon, an LDS church leader, visited southern Utah in 1869, and in a letter to the Deseret News dated March 22, 1869, he gave a similar description of the road east of Ash Creek:
Despite the “perilous” nature of this road, it received extensive use. During the boom years of the mining town of Silver Reef, from 1878 to 1882, as many as 200 wagons, laden with silver bullion, might traverse it in a single day. Morris Shirts found broken springs, horse shoes, and silver ore samples on the road in modern times, all evidence of its frequent use during the silver boom. During this period, it was an economic lifeline for southern Utah. 73
Partially because of this heavy use, the road required continual upkeep. In 1878 the territorial legislature awarded southern Utah three thousand dollars “for widening dugways, removing rocks from the roads, and graveling or otherwise covering what is known as the Grapevine Sand, and generally repairing and straightening the Territorial Road from the head of the Black Ridge Dugway . . . through Bellevue and Leeds, to St. George.” 74 Thus the “County Road” became a one-lane dirt road with turnouts.
Travelers, freighters, ranchers, and tourists continued to dread the Black Ridge stretch of road, though they had no other option but to use it. Then in 1924, a new road was built west of Ash Creek, “along the old pioneer route” laid down by Erastus Snow and the Road Commission in 1862, which might, in turn, have followed the Hamblin-Judd route. 75 With this road, the pioneer Black Ridge era came to an end. Arrowhead Highway and Highway 91 followed this route, as does today’s Interstate 15. 76
As we drive effortlessly and quickly along I-15 today, it is far from easy to imagine the difficulties of the old Ash Creek Canyon roads, the ridge strewn with boulders that Mary Judd, Jacob Hamblin, and other pioneers of Santa Clara had to surmount and descend in spring 1856; the wagons breaking down on jagged basaltic rocks as pioneers made their slow way to St. George in late 1861; the disassembled wagons lowered down the steep ravine of Peter’s Leap; or the precipitous dugway with its terrifying drop-off to Ash Creek that so unnerved Elizabeth Kane in 1872.
Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco’s map (detail) of the 1776 Dominguez-Escalante expedition. This famous map depicts the Black Ridge area above the Rio Sulfureo or Virgin River.
utah state historical society
As Joseph Fish wrote, “The next generation will never know how their parents came to Dixie without roads, just rocks and sand.” 77 Creating roads in Dixie—and keeping them usable—presented just as much a challenge and a communal accomplishment as did carrying out cooperative economic ventures and erecting civic and religious buildings in town centers. If the St. George Tabernacle and Temple are testaments to early Mormon communitarian culture, the Black Ridge roads are no less so.
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Todd Compton is the author of In Sacred Loneliness (1997) and A Frontier Life (2013). He lives in Northern California, but visits his relatives in Utah every summer.
NOTES
1 Halka Chronic, Roadside Geology of Utah (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press, 1990), 244. A volcanic eruption about two million years ago caused lava to flow down present Ash Creek Canyon. After it hardened into black basalt, it eroded much more slowly than surrounding rock and so became a ridge. The Black Ridge basaltic rock is of “the same age and composition” as that on top of the Hurricane Cliffs to the east. The history of the Black Ridge road has been told in such sources as James Bleak, “Annals of the Southern Utah Mission,” holograph, MS 318, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL); Richard E. Turley Jr., ed., Selected Collections from the Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2 vols., 74 DVDs (Provo, UT: BYU Press, 2002), 1:19; Andrew Karl Larson, “I Was Called To Dixie”: The Virgin River Basin: Unique Experiences in Mormon Pioneering (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1960), 514–19; Janet Seegmiller, A History of Iron County: Community Above Self (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Iron County Commission, 1997), 380; Douglas D. Alder and Karl F. Brooks, A History of Washington County: From Isolation to Destination (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Washington County Commission, 1996), 225–26. Of special value are the writings of Morris Shirts, a descendant of Peter Shirts. See Morris A. Shirts, “The Black Ridge: Extracts from ‘Peter’s Diary’,” typescript, M277.9248 B627s 1970, CHL, and “Black Ridge Mountains,” typescript, F 832.S68 S54, Special Collections, Gerald R. Sherratt Library, Southern Utah University, Cedar City, Utah (hereafter SLSUU). None of these accounts covers the important Hamblin-Judd expedition in 1856.
2 As quoted in Andrew Karl Larson, The Red Hills of November: A Pioneer Biography of Utah’s Cotton Town (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1957), 69.
3 Ibid.
4 See Edward Leo Lyman, The Overland Journey from Utah to California: Wagon Travel from the City of Saints to the City of Angels (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004). The Spanish Trail provided the more direct route from northern Utah to southern California, so overland travelers rarely took the Ash Creek Canyon route. One exception was the Dukes-Turner company in 1857; see Lyman, Overland Journey, 140–41.
5 For Mormonism’s communitarian history, see Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). For the wider American background, see Donald E. Pitzer, ed., America’s Communal Utopias: The Developmental Process (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1997), which has a chapter on Mormonism.
6 See Shirts, “The Black Ridge: Extracts,” appendix, “Probable Road History,” SLSUU, for evidence of Indian use of the Peter’s Leap area.
7 LaVan Martineau, The Southern Paiutes: Legends, Lore, Language, and Lineage (Las Vegas: K.C. Publications, 1992), 186 (quotations); William R. Palmer, “Indian Names in Utah Geography,” Utah Historical Quarterly 1, no. 1 (January 1928): 22. Pauites also called Ash Creek Too’Yoonuv.
8 William R. Palmer, “Pahute Indian Homelands,” Utah Historical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (July 1933): 794–95.
9 Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, The Domínguez-Escalante Journal: Their Expedition through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico in 1776, trans. Fray Angelico Chavez, ed. Ted J. Warner (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995), 93–94. The Spanish reads “entramos en una cuchilla toda de mal país que está entre dos sierras altas en forma de puerto.”
10 Ibid. Ted J. Warner places this camp 2.4 miles north of Pintura.
11 Dale Lowell Morgan, Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 197, 238.
12 William B. Smart and Donna T. Smart, eds., Over the Rim, The Parley P. Pratt Exploring Expedition to Southern Utah, 1849–50 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999), 180–81, 86–88.
13 Ibid., 180–81.
14 Morris A. Shirts and Kathryn H. Shirts, A Trial Furnace: Southern Utah’s Iron Mission (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2001); Bleak, “Annals,” 17, CHL; Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, Washington County Chapter, Under Dixie Sun: A History of Washington County by Those Who Loved Their Forbears (Panguitch, UT: Garfield County News, 1950), 127.
15 For Lee, see Juanita Brooks, John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1985). For Peter Shirts, see Peter Shurtz Jr., “History of Peter Shirts,” from Ambrose Schurtz, “History of the Shurtz or Shirts Family,” typescript, MSS A 1746, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter USHS); Shirts and Shirts, A Trial Furnace, index.
16 John D. Lee, letter to the editor, February 20, 1852, published as “Letter from Elder John D. Lee,” Deseret News, April 3, 1852.
17 George A. Smith, “History of the Settling of Southern Utah,” in Turley, Selected Collections, 1:3.
18 J. C. L. Smith and John Steele, letter to the editor, June 26, 1852, published as “Letter from Parowan,” Deseret News, August 7, 1852; J. Cecil Alter, ed., “Journal of Priddy Meeks,” Utah Historical Quarterly 10 (1942): 187.
19 New Harmony, west of this, was laid out in 1862. Only New Harmony is inhabited today.
20 Bleak, “Annals,” 23, CHL.
21 Ibid.
22 Juanita Brooks, ed., Journal of the Southern Indian Mission; Diary of Thomas D. Brown (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1972), 38–39; Jacob Hamblin, Diary, June 7 [sic], holograph, Jacob Hamblin Papers, 1850–1877, MS 1951, CHL; Todd M. Compton, A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013).
23 Brooks, Journal of the Southern Indian Mission, 39.
24 Ibid., 43.
25 Lewis’s diary is excerpted in a November 9, 1854, letter that Thomas Brown sent to Brigham Young; see Brooks, Journal of the Southern Indian Mission, 93–97.
26 Mary Minerva Dart Judd, “Autobiography of Mary Minerva Dart Judd, 1879–1926,” holograph, Huntington Library, San Marino, California (hereafter HL). This holograph contains two different versions of Judd’s autobiography, which I will refer to as “autobiography one” and “autobiography two.” “Autobiography three” is a typescript, copy in my possession.
27 Hamblin, Diary, March 1856, CHL.
28 Not to be confused with the Black Ridge in Ash Creek Canyon. Quotes from Mary Judd, autobiography three.
29 Ibid.
30 Mary Judd, autobiography two, HL.
31 Mary probably meant “northern” or “northwestern.” Mary Judd, autobiography three.
32 Judd, autobiography one, 4, HL. Lee apparently brought wagons through Ash Creek Canyon in 1852, but there was certainly no wagon road in the canyon. In the second autobiography, Mary wrote “We . . . packed up and started over the mountaines where there had no wagon had ever travelled before.”
33 Hamblin, Diary, 68–69, CHL.
34 Judd, autobiography two, 11–12, HL.
35 Judd, autobiography three.
36 In his autobiography, George Hicks recorded getting trapped by a major snowstorm at the Black Ridge for four days. Polly Aird, Jeff Nichols, and Will Bagley, eds., Playing with Shadows: Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2011), 171–72.
37 John Woodhouse, John Woodhouse: His Pioneer Journal, 1830–1916, comp. James Mercer Kirkham, Kate Woodhouse Kirkham, and family (Salt Lake City: Elbert C. Kirkham, 1952), 27, electronic resource, CHL.
38 Bleak, “Annals,” 55, CHL.
39 Seegmiller, Iron County, 379 (quotation); Shirts, “The Black Ridge: Extracts,” appendix, “Probable Road History,” SLSUU. I have not yet found an early source for this story.
40 Bleak, “Annals,” 56, CHL.
41 Woodhouse, Pioneer Journal, 28–29.
42 Shirts, “Black Ridge: Extracts,” appendix, “Probable Road History.”
43 Woodhouse, Pioneer Journal, 29.
44 Bleak, “Annals,” 55–56, CHL.
45 George A. Smith, “History of the Settling of Southern Utah,” in Turley, Selected Collections, 1:3.
46 Donald G. Godfrey and Rebecca S. Martineau-McCarty, eds., An Uncommon Pioneer: The Journals of James Henry Martineau 1828–1919 (Provo: Religious Studies Center / Brigham Young University, 2008), 70. Martineau claimed that he coined the name Peter’s Leap, but if the court records quoted by Bleak are correct, the name was in use by June 1857.
47 Ibid., 101.
48 Bleak, “Annals,” 79, CHL; see also the County Court actions of December 27, 1859, ibid., 76.
49 “President Young’s Visit South,” Deseret News, June 12, 1861.
50 “A Difficult Mission: Obedient to a Call,” typescript of Hugh Moon journal, accessed May 9, 2012, http://moonfamily.4t. com/mission.html.
51 Ibid.
52 Shirts, “Black Ridge: Excerpts,” 15.
53 Bleak, “Annals,” 100, CHL.
54 Mary Ann Mansfield Bentley, “The Family History of Mary Ann Mansfield Bentley,” typescript, 7, MSS A 1561, USHS; see also “The First Christmas in St. George,” in Daughters of Utah Pioneers, An Enduring Legacy (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1978), 1:166.
55 Robert Glass Cleland and Juanita Brooks, eds., A Mormon Chronicle: the Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848–1876, vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983), 1:163, 166, 185, 196, 207.
56 Bleak, “Annals,” 148, CHL.
57 Ibid., 161–62 (quotation), 163.
58 Larson, I Was Called to Dixie, 517.
59 William Henry Jackson, The Diaries of William Henry Jackson, ed. LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1959), as cited in Seegmiller, Iron County, 379.
60 Ibid., 149, 155; Alder and Brooks, Washington County, 226.
61 Bleak, “Annals,” 163, CHL.
62 Larson, I Was Called to Dixie, 515.
63 Erastus Snow, report to the Territorial Assembly, in Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah, Eighteenth Annual Session, for the Year 1869 (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon, [1869]), 71; Seegmiller, Iron County, 379–80; Shirts, “Black Ridge: Extracts,” appendix, “Probable Road History.”
64 Bleak, “Annals,” 358, 372, CHL; Ezra C. Knowlton, History of Highway Development in Utah ([Salt Lake City]: Utah State Department of Highways, [1964]), 236; Seegmiller, Iron County, 380.
65 Erastus Snow to Brigham Young, June 29, 1868, in Bleak, “Annals,” 399, 412–13 (quotation), CHL.
66 Erastus Snow, report to Territorial Assembly, 71.
67 Bleak, “Annals,” 446, CHL.
68 “From the Diary of Charles R. Savage,” in Kate Carter, comp., Our Pioneer Heritage (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1958–), 14:41.
69 Shirts, “The Black Ridge: Extracts,” appendix, “Probable Road History.”
70 Elizabeth Wood Kane, Twelve Mormon Homes: Visited in Succession on a Journey through Utah to Arizona (Salt Lake City: Tanner Trust Fund / University of Utah Library, 1974, first pub. 1874), 123–26.
71 Bleak, “Annals,” 448, CHL; Althea Hafen, “Bellevue (Pintura),” in Under Dixie Sun, 357–59.
72 Letter from “Nonnac,” Deseret News, April 7, 1869.
73 Shirts, “Black Ridge: Excerpts,” 19.
74 Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah, Twenty-Third Session, for the year 1878, as quoted in Alder and Brooks, Washington County, 226; see also Laws, Memorials and Resolution of the Territory of Utah, Passed at the Twenty-Third Session of the Legislative Assembly (Salt Lake City: Star Books and Printing Office, 1878), 57.
75 Knowlton, Highway Development, 236; Seegmiller, Iron County, 387; Angus M. Woodbury, “A History of Southern Utah and Its National Parks,” Utah Historical Quarterly 12 (1944): 205.
76 Edward Leo Lyman, “The Arrowhead Trails Highway: The Beginnings of Utah’s Other Route to the Pacific Coast,” Utah Historical Quarterly 67, no. 3 (1999): 257.
77 Joseph Fish, “History of Enterprise,” 248, typescript, SLSUU, as cited in Seegmiller, Iron County, 380.
