A History of Washington County

The land and its early inhabitants

THE LAND AND ITS EARLY INHABITANTS "Show me one thing of beauty in the whole area and I'll stay."-Wilhemina Cannon "It looks like the good Lord took everything left over from the creation, dumped it here, then set it on fire."-Juanita Brooks " . . . showing no signs of water or fertility;... a wide expanse of chaotic matter presented itself, huge hills, sandy deserts, cheer­less, grassless plains, perpendicular rocks, loose barren clay, dis­solving beds of sandstone.. .lying in inconceivable confusion-in short a country in ruins, dissolved by the pelting of the storm of ages, or turned inside out, upside down by terrible convulsions in some former age..."-Parley P. Pratt Geologic Description The above early descriptions of Washington County reflected the feelings of many white people when they first saw the area. The geol­ogy, geography, and climate of the area all played an important role in its human activity and settlement, from the earliest inhabitants to HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY the present; all indications are that the future will continue to be impacted by them all. A complex succession of volcanic rocks, including flows, breccia, and ignimbrites, aggregating several thou­sand feet in thickness, overlies the sedimentary sequence. Several lac-colithic intrusive bodies in the northwest part of the county are intimately related to volcanic activity and deformation. The Pine Valley Mountains are capped by the world's largest known laccolith, its cover stripped by erosion. Washington County, lying in the southwest corner of Utah, is more or less coincident with the area known as Utah's Dixie. It is bor­dered on the south by Arizona, on the west by Nevada, on the north by Iron County, and on the east by Kane County. Because of the physical barrier of the Grand Canyon, the "Arizona Strip" north of the canyon is in many practical respects more a part of Washington County than it is of Arizona. It is a region of colorful rocks, spectac­ular scenery, and great contrasts in rainfall, vegetation, animal life and geologic features. It has the lowest elevations and generally warmest temperatures in the state. These features have played impor­tant roles in the human activity and settlement of the area. Washington County is divided topographically into two parts by the Hurricane Cliffs. The cliffs are the result of movement along the great Hurricane Fault, elevating the land east of the fault several hun­dred feet higher than that to the west. East of this escarpment are the colorful mesas and plateaus of the Zion National Park region, into which steep-walled, narrow canyons have been cut by streams of low volume and, for the most part, intermittent flow. These streams are given great erosive power by loads of abrasive silt and sand which are carried at relatively high velocities, especially during thunderstorms or periods of rapid snow melting. The plateaus and mesas, cut from horizontally layered sedimentary rocks, diminish in elevation south­ward in step fashion and are capped by successively older, resistant formations. West of the Hurricane Cliffs is a basin-and-range topog­raphy, reflecting a more complex geologic structure. The rock for­mations there are folded, faulted, and more varied. St. George lies in a topographic basin north of which rises the dark mass of the Pine Valley Mountains. Over the eons, southwest­ern Utah has been subjected to great invasions of molten rock, some THE LAND AND ITS EARLY INHABITANTS below the surface and some upon it. The Pine Valley Mountains are a spectacular example of the former process, now exposed by relent­less erosion. Between St. George and the highest peak there is an ele­vation difference of more than 7,000 feet-from a low of about 2,800 feet to a high of nearly 10,000 feet at the top of the Pine Valley range. On the west, the St. George basin is bounded by the Beaver Dam Mountains, which extend below the intermountain basins into Nevada. The jumble of low, irregular hills in northwestern Washington County is the result of complex geologic forces. The lava flows along the Hurricane Cliffs, in Snow Canyon, and adjacent to St. George, ranging in age from a few thousand to several million years, are the result of outpourings of black basalt, once red hot. Only a small northwestern portion of Washington County is part of the Great Basin, a vast region whose streamflows do not reach the ocean. The rest is drained by the Virgin River, a tributary of the Colorado River. From the high plateaus it flows southward through the depths of Zion Canyon, turns west to cut through the Hurricane Cliffs at LaVerkin, crosses the St. George Basin, and then plunges into a magnificent chasm between the Beaver Dam Mountains on the north and the Virgin Mountains on the south. The Virgin River and the tributaries that feed it are subject to seasonal variation; rising sharply during thunderstorms and run-off season, they slow to a trickle in drought or by summer's end. Rivers such as the Virgin are the creations of the topography which reflects the underlying geologic structures. Some rocks are more resistant than others to destructive weathering and erosion. Movement of crystal can cause fractures that become lines of weak­ness to be exploited by the streams at Bryce, Grand, and Zion Canyons. Land that is elevated-whether by uplift or the piling up of masses of igneous rocks-as in the high plateaus and at the Pine Valley Mountains, guides air movement around it. Rising air is cooled and precipitates its moisture as rain or snow. Hence, the principal sources of water, both on the surface and in the underground aquifers, are these same plateaus and mountains. The Navajo sand­stone that forms the colorful cliffs in Zion and Snow canyons also contains great quantities of good water. Within Washington County a complete structural transition HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY takes place from the flat-lying formations of the Colorado Plateau on the east to the fault blocks of previously folded and thrust faulted rocks that define the Basin and Range geologic province. This helps account for the varied descriptions given by the early white visitors to the area mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. It is the same rugged beauty and warm climate that was a problem to the early white settlers that has been a boon to the growth and development of the county in the late twentieth century. Native Americans Early Native American inhabitants in Utah identified by anthro­pologists, archaeologists, and historians include those of the Desert Archaic, Anasazi, and Fremont cultures, as well as members of Ute, Paiute, Gosiute, Shoshoni, Navajo, and other tribes. Evidence shows a human presence for about 10,000 years. Indian peoples had their own boundaries that separated the territory of one group from another, but they had no relationship to the present boundaries of Utah or the counties within the state. These early people generally organized themselves into small bands of several families, groups that were limited in size because of limited resources. The lack of formal organization is striking. There were no nations, no confederacies. The word "tribe" is a white man's characterization of people who spoke the same dialect and did not fight among them­selves. The coming of white people made it necessary for Native Americans to band more tightly together. Some of Utah's historic Native Americans were considered among the poorest in America. They were named "Diggers" by white intruders who watched them digging for roots and believed that they lived no better than animals. They were of the Uto-Aztecan language family, related to the modern corn-growing Pima and Hopi Indians and to the mighty Aztecs of Mexico. It was lack of corn horticulture and lack of contact that condemned them to relative stagnation. They used minimal tools yet had a great amount of knowledge about ani­mal habits. Equipment was produced from poles and twigs, grass and bark, including the domed wickiup of poles and brush, clothing of cedar bark, and baskets, seed beaters, mush stirrers, and containers for gathering, storing, winnowing, and boiling with heated stones. THE LAND AND ITS EARLY INHABITANTS Ranger Donal J. Jolley inspects Anasazi food cache in Zion National Park. (National Park Service photo, J. L. Crawford Collection) They made water-tight baskets smeared inside and out with pine gum. The quest for food kept them on the move. They grouped their brush huts and windbreaks near seed patches or pinyon trees for a few days while they harvested the yield. Then they might split up and join other families or go it alone, for there were no rules but to get food wherever and whenever possible. Without resources for further improvement or stimulus from the outside, their lifestyle remained traditional. They were few in number, peaceable in disposition, and reliant on shamans or medicine men to placate the invisible forces with which their world was filled. Bows and arrows were used in hunting but rarely for warfare. Their basket-making was an art form. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their women and chil­dren were sometimes taken by raiding parties of other tribes to be sold to the Spanish and Mexicans. Though they sometimes raised corn, squash and beans, the Indians lived principally on fish, birds, wild game, wild fruits, roots, and seeds. They used the rock grinder, HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY or metate and mano, for grinding corn, mesquite beans, and grass seeds for flour for making bread. The largest band of Native Americans in Washington County was the Parrusits. Others in the area were Tonaquints, Paiutes, and Shivwits. At the time of the white settlement in the 1850s and 1860s there were perhaps a thousand Parrusits in the county, with their camping places near Rockville, Virgin, Toquerville, Washington Fields, and Santa Clara. These bands were held together under regu­lar tribal control. Fatalities from white man's diseases and the dimin-ishment of food supplies were main factors in the drastic reduction of the Indian population. Of the estimated one thousand Parrusits living along the Virgin River in the 1850s and 1860s, the last survivor, Peter Harrison, died in 1945. Today in the 1990s there is a small community on the Shivwits reservation about ten miles west of St. George as well as several Indian families living in the cities of Washington County. Spaniards For white men, the Washington County area was often a place to get through as soon as possible, certainly not a place in which to live. Before the arrival of the Mormons in the mid-1850s only a few white men had ever been through it. The most thoroughly documented evidence of early Spanish exploration of this area comes from the expedition of Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Fray Silvestre Velez de Escalante, which came through Washington County in October 1776. An early snow­fall on 5 October near Milford caused them to give up the idea of going on to California. A casting of lots determined that they should return to Santa Fe. Instead of retracing their route, they determined to attempt a short cut. They turned southeast, coming out of the desert that now bears Escalante's name a few miles west of Cedar City. The high mountains to the east forced them southward along the foot of the rough and rugged escarpment known as the Hurricane Fault. It was on this detour that they discovered the Virgin River (named by them Sulphur Creek), Ash Creek (which they called Rio de Pilar), and hot sulphur springs. They continued south to the site of subsequent Fort THE LAND AND ITS EARLY INHABITANTS Pearce but repeated warnings of the Grand Canyon convinced them to change their route toward the east. A group of Parrusit Indians agreed to show them a route over the Hurricane Fault. They ended up climbing the bold face of the fault and, guided only by vague directions given by the Indians, the party left Washington County in late October. American Explorers After Dominguez and Escalante, the next pathbreaker of impor­tance to enter Washington County was Jedediah Strong Smith, whose trips in 1826 and again in 1827 overlapped Escalante's trail for short distances in Washington County. He was traveling southwest from the Bear Lake Valley looking for a route to California. On his first trip in 1826, Smith followed the Virgin River through the narrows (present route of 1-15), a hazardous undertaking since the steep narrow gorge is barely wide enough for the stream. This would have involved much wading of the stream over shifting quicksand, through deep holes, and around giant boulders. On his second trip, a year later, he avoided these narrows by going up the Santa Clara River, crossing over a pass to the drainage into Beaver Dam Wash, which he followed down to the Virgin. At the mouth of the Santa Clara he met a group of Paiute Indians growing corn; he called the Santa Clara "Corn Creek." Smith's pioneering trips not only opened a new route to the Pacific coast, but reports of his travels and stories of adventure undoubtedly encouraged others to follow. One of these was George C. Yount who was with Smith in the mountains for a while. In the fall of 1830 Yount joined a party organized by William Wolfskill at Santa Fe for the purpose of reaching the coast. This group followed Escalante's route into Washington County, then picked up Smith's route over the Mountain Meadows and down to the Colorado River. The story of this trip was told by Yount in his old age and the details are not precise, but it appears his group must have attempted to follow Smith's trail. It is probable that these explorations had a great deal to do with the development of the Old Spanish Trail, which became a regular overland route crossing Washington County from Pinto through the Mountain Meadows, down the Santa Clara past HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY Gunlock, over the divide to Beaver Dam Wash, paralleling the Virgin River across desert hills to the Muddy River, then across the desert toward Los Angeles via Las Vegas. Jedediah Smith ignored or was unaware of Escalante's naming of the Virgin River as Sulphur Creek; he instead named it "the Adams River" (for U.S. President John Quincy Adams), which name he used in letters written on both trips of 1826 and 1827. This upsets the idea that he named it for Thomas Virgen, a member of his second party. George C. Yount told of entering the Virgin River valley on a trip in 1830, but this is no assurance that it was so named at that early date. The river bore the name of Rio Virgin in 1844 when John C. Fremont passed over the Spanish Trail and doubtless the name was given between 1827 and 1844. Melvin T. Smith mentions other trapper groups of James Ohio Pattie and Thomas "Pegleg" Smith that came into the area in the late 1820s.1 By 1844 when Captain John C. Fremont of the U.S. Army came through Washington County from California to Utah, the Spanish Trail was a well-defined route over which annual caravans traveled back and forth from Santa Fe to the coast. Fremont gave a detailed description of the terrain as he passed through in early May of 1844, drew some rough maps, and wrote a report of his trip. His inclusion of the name "Virgin River" made its use permanent. In mid-November 1847, Mormon leaders in Salt Lake City, eager to get seeds, cuttings, and roots from California and to open up a route for trade, called a group of sixteen men to make the journey. Among them were frontiersmen Captain Jefferson Hunt of the Mormon Battalion and Orrin Porter Rockwell. This mounted com­pany traveled through Washington County along the Old Spanish Trail to California and returned the same way the following spring. Twenty-five returning members of the Mormon Battalion were right behind, bringing the first wagon over this route. In October 1849 a group of "forty-niners" hired Jefferson Hunt to guide them to California; they also traveled through Washington County. Now that the southern trail was more clearly marked, Brigham Young sent Parley P. Pratt south with fifty young men for the purpose of looking for sites for future towns. Permanent settle­ments were soon to follow. THE LAND AND ITS EARLY INHABITANTS Definition of "Dixie" Since the word "Dixie" is used almost synonymously with the term "Washington County" in this book, more specific explanation seems essential. Visitors from out of state are often startled to find the word "Dixie" referring to a place in Utah. People in Utah also often do not generally understand its meaning specifically, just that it is in southern Utah. Such imprecision is quickly corrected by southern Utahns from Cedar City or Beaver who do not identify themselves as being from Dixie. The word "Dixie" in Utah can be linked to the growing of cotton in the area of Washington County; it can empha­size the fact that the climate is distinctly different from that of the rest of the state, being warm in winter; it can refer to the area as of lower altitude, some 2,500 feet below the nearby rim of the Great Basin that includes much of the populated area of the state. Not long after Mormon settlers arrived in Washington County, the area was identified as "Dixie." A newspaper was published in 1868 named Our Dixie Times. Pioneer George Hicks'well-known song began with these lines: "Once I lived in Cottonwood and owned a little farm, But I was called to Dixie, which did me much alarm." The first two companies to settle Washington City included people from the southern states. They were sent to raise cotton and soon began calling their new home "Utah's Dixie." The name was essentially a nickname, but it came to mean more than that-a term of endearment, of identity. The name stuck and is a point of pride as much now as it was then. Dixie College was founded in 1911 under the name "St. George Stake Academy." The students, however, painted the word "Dixie" on the "Sugar Loaf" outcropping and a block "D" on the nearby black hill, all within the first few years of the college's existence, and the name commonly used was "Dixie College." One fairly precise way to define Utah's Dixie is to equate it with the Virgin River drainage system.2 The match is not 100 percent but it comes close. It includes the land drained by the Virgin River and its tributaries, the Santa Clara and the other creeks draining into the Virgin-Quail Creek, Ash Creek, North Creek, East Fork, Fort Pearce 10 HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY Wash, Gould's Wash, La Verkin Creek, Kolob Creek, Oak Valley Creek, Three Creeks, and Shunesburg Creek. The area from Pine Valley on the north to the Virgin River Gorge on the south and from Zion National Park to the Arizona Strip is often called "Dixie." Some areas, such as Kolob and Pine Valley, because of their higher elevation, lack the semi-tropical climate that is usually associated with Dixie, but they belong to both the drainage system and the cultural area of Dixie. Other areas lie outside the jurisdiction of Washington County, even outside of the state of Utah, but share Dixie's climate and culture. Pipe Spring in northern Arizona looks to Dixie, and for the first century Bunkerville and Mesquite (below the Gorge in Nevada) were part of Dixie. The Arizona Strip is also an area whose ranchers were (and are) tied to Washington County. Such elements of imprecision must not confuse the reality that the term Dixie remains roughly synonymous with Washington County. Further exceptions must be noted. The Virgin River actually rises on Cedar Mountain north of Washington County. That area has never been considered part of Dixie. Also, the town of Enterprise in Washington County does not lie in the Virgin River drainage system. Politically, Enterprise belongs to Washington County, but in climate and elevation it does not. The sphere of influence of the city of St. George is another way to define "Dixie." Officially St. George is the county seat; but it is much more than that. It was the base of Erastus Snow's apostolic ter­ritory in pioneer times. His authority was unchallenged and respected throughout the county and well beyond. The early location of the first LDS temple completed in the West increased the city's regional importance beyond the county boundaries. Now that Las Vegas has such a temple, the area of impact of the St. George temple has shrunk, but it still draws faithful Mormons from border counties, including nearby Nevada towns such as Panaca, Mesquite, and Bunkerville, as well as the Utah communities of Kanab, Cedar City, Beaver, and Panguitch. Shopping facilities also draw people to St. George from adjacent communities and counties. The pull of the shopping malls has greatly increased this economic bond in the last decade as fewer THE LAND AND ITS EARLY INHABITANTS 11 people have found it necessary to travel to Las Vegas for their shop­ping needs. The Spectrum newspaper is published daily in St. George and serves Washington County as well as the nearby Nevada towns in eastern Lincoln County and the Mesquite-Bunkerville area. A sep­arate Cedar City edition of the paper serves Iron County. Also the Dixie Regional Medical Center has helped expand St. George's sphere of influence. The name "Dixie" does not command the loyalty of the youth as it once did, however. If they attend Hurricane or Pine View or Snow Canyon or Enterprise high schools, they do not resonate to the name "Dixie" as do those who attend Dixie High School. As long as there was only one high school in the whole county, everyone identified very closely with the word because it had so many levels of meaning. Ironically, the many newcomers, mostly older folks, who recently have come to Dixie generally are more than pleased to identify with the term "Dixie." In the long run, the most simple definition of "Dixie" comes from a song that Roene di Fiore's students at Dixie College per­formed with their singing mayor, Marion Bowler, as soloist. Thousands of visitors were greeted with: Are you from Dixie? I said from Dixie. Where the fields of cotton beckon to me. We're glad to see ya To say "How be ya?" And the friends we're longin' to see. If you're from Santa Clara, Washington or St. George fine, Anywhere below the Iron County line, Then you're from Dixie. Hurray for Dixie 'Cause I'm from Dixie too.3 ENDNOTES 1. Melvin T. Smith, "Forces That Shaped Utah's Dixie," Utah Historical Quarterly47 (Spring 1979): 110-25. 12 HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY 2. Lowell C. Bennion and Merrill K. Ridd, "Utah's Dynamic Dixie: Satellite of Salt Lake, Las Vegas, or Los Angeles?" Utah Historical Quarterly 47 (Spring 1979): 311-27. 3. Original music is attributed to George L. Cobb and words to Jack Yellen, with these words adapted by Dan Watson and Roene di Fiore.