[On July 24, 1847, a weary group of about 150 migrants founded Salt Lake City. So for the city’s 175th birthday, this week I’ll AmericanStudy Utah histories, leading up to a special weekend post on that founding community!]
On
striking stories behind a few of the state’s truly stunning landscapes.
1)
Arches:
While it’s vital to note (apropos of yesterday’s post) that no white arrivals “discovered”
the amazing natural wonders that would become Arches National Park, the story
of how the region came to the attention of the National Park Service is still
strikingly representative of early 20th century Western US
histories. It’s a story that features a railroad executive (Frank
Wadleigh), a photographer (George
Beam), a Hungarian immigrant turned prospector (Alexander
Ringhoffer), a grad student in geology and future Arctic explorer (Laurence
Gould), and a local doctor (J.W. “Doc”
Williams), without every one of
whom it’s quite possible the site would not have been designated a National
Monument in 1929. If that ain’t a miniseries waiting to happen, I don’t know what
is.
2)
Bryce
Canyon: When my family took our Southwestern
National Parks trip in the spring of 1990, we weren’t able to make it to
Arches, but we did get to visit the other two parks I’ll highlight in this
post. Everything we saw on that trip was quite literally awesome to me, but
definitely a highlight were the hoodoos
of Bryce, one of the more spectacular natural wonders I’ve ever been
around. But that’s apparently not what the park’s namesake felt—Scottish
immigrant farmer
Ebenezer Bryce, who was sent by the Mormons with his wife to initially settle
the area, supposedly said of the hoodoo amphitheaters that they were “a helluva
place to lose a cow.” I’ve often been struck by the image of a teenage Ben
Franklin tending his family’s cows on Boston Common, but I think that
Ebenezer Bryce frustratedly searching for a cow amidst the grandeur of the hoodoos
might be even more striking still.
3)
Zion:
Zion and Bryce are close together, at least for the incredibly wide-open spaces
of the Southwest, and share similar natural formations as well as some parallel
Mormon
histories. But Zion’s name developed much less organically, and reflects a
frustrating reality underlying pretty much all of America’s National Parks (and
certainly all those in the west). When President Taft designated the area a
National Monument in 1909 (making it Utah’s first such site), it was known as Mukuntuweap,
after explorer John
Wesley Powell’s tribute to the Paiute people and their language. But in
1919, National Park Service Director
Horace Albright designated the site a National Park and changed the name to
Zion in the process, ostensibly because it was the Mormon term for the region
but also because it would be
more palatable to white tourists. We can’t tell the story of Utah’s parks,
no more than any others, without recognizing their fraught and too often
destructive relationship to native communities and voices.
Next Utah
history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other Utah histories or stories you’d highlight?
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