The Land Apart

THE ARIZONA STRIP A LAND APART

Time: Summer, 1540. Scene: La Gran Barranca - The Grand Canyon. Action: García López de Cárdenas and a dozen daring men detach from the Coronado expedition and trek northwestward along the Coconino Plateau in search of a city made of gold. Now Captain Cárdenas and his companions meet frustration at every turn. However, they press their patrols and encounter the rim of the precipice looming a mile above a great river. A couple of the Spaniards try climbing down the vertical stone walls and steep slopes. They give up, exhausted. There is no way for them to cross to the canyon's north rim, eight miles distant. And beyond that? The gallant and gullible conquistadores would never know what lay on the other side of that Dantesque barranca - a land apart. And so it remains today. Known as the Arizona Strip, it is 8000 square miles of mesas, plateaus, piney woods, sagebrush flats and breathtaking beauty.

It's a good four hours' drive north of Phoenix before you even catch sight of the Strip. North up Interstate 17 to Flagstaff, then over the crest and down U.S. 89 along the northwestern edge of the Navajo reservation, the route runs through scenic country which changes as time and miles tick on.

Just past the turnoff to Tuba City, the highway picks up the Echo Cliffs. They grow more imposing along the right side of the road until, at a bend about milepost 514, a new horizon - a high and wide onecomes into view.

It's the flat top of the Vermilion Cliffs. These stretch west as far as you can see, and east until they seem to collide with the Echo Cliffs. The highway - now 89Abends right, then left. The two long rims would be one, but the Colorado River slices between them, ever so neatly - and ever so deeply.

Easing down to the 15 mile-per-hour speed limit, travelers trundle uneasily across the spindly looking, but still sturdy, halfcentury-old Navajo Bridge: more than 800 feet of girders, rivets, and concrete, 500 feet above the river. On the other side looms the Strip Country.

Even today, any other highway back to Flagstaff and Phoenix goes by way of Utah, Nevada, or California. That's how formidable the Colorado's canyons are - and that's a big reason why the Strip today remains a land apart.

Past Navajo Bridge, the highway skirts the awesome Vermilion Cliffs, windand water-worn into spires half a mile high. Along their base you'll see scatterings of huge sandstone boulders. Once upon a time they were way up there. They've tumbled down, most of them so long ago the clay floor around them has been worn away. Today, many of the boulders - some house-size-stand on natural pedestals as if they'd been balanced for display.

When will another come tearing down from the heights? The thought of it adds a tingle of adventure to a half-hour's drive along the Strip's eastern edge. Imagine what it was like for pioneers making the trip in covered wagons, along the very base of the cliffs.

They were on the Honeymoon Trail. A hundred years ago, it carried Mormon couples from settlements as far south as Safford to have their marriages solemnized in the temple at St. George. Its tracks still show at several points along the route. Easiest to see are the ones crossing the Lees Ferry road, just past Navajo Bridge. (See story, page 30.) Highway 89A offers ever-changing, up-close views of the cliffs before they turn northward and the highway heads west onto the Kaibab Plateau.

From the 4500-foot level of House Rock Valley, some of the best engineered highway ever built twists and turns from sagebrush through juniper to the pines of the Kaibab National Forest and the

Strip Country THE LAND

8000-foot altitude of Jacob Lake.

Forty-five miles south is the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, with its own vast variety of views and deep-lying layers of rock harboring secrets of when the world was young.

Winter weather may close the road from Jacob Lake. When it does, highway signs as far south as Gray Mountain give drivers the alternative of going to the South Rim at Cameron. When it's open, though, Arizona Highway 67 is an exhilarating route to a gorgeous gorge.

North of Jacob Lake, 89A drops off the plateau toward the wide-open spaces between Fredonia and the Utah-Nevada-Arizona corner a hundred miles west.

Onto those open lands, in 1776, came Fathers Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, on their way back from a journey they hoped would take them from Santa Fe to California. They reached northern Utah before they realized they were still a long way from the Pacific. The weather turned cold. They turned south.

The Spanish priests, a half-dozen Santa Fe merchants, and their Indian porters entered today's Arizona, tired, hungry, and intimidated by the infernally forbidding canyons of the Colorado.

It was late October and growing colder as they trudged south and east across the flats, over the Kaibab, and along the Ver-milion Cliffs. Their campsite in House Rock Valley they called San Bartolomé, after Christ's apostle to other Indians half a world away. Today, it's a clearly marked historical site just off the highway.

The padres were well into their second week of searching for a Colorado crossing. An Indian who had volunteered to guide them had deserted a few days later, reluc-tant to leave his people.

Food was running out. Beneath the cliffs, a pack horse became a meal. Pine nuts, grass seed, and cactus fruit from the Indi-ans stemmed starvation - and made some of them sick. Map maker Bernardo de Miera took terribly ill. He was treated by tribal medicine men with "song and cere-monies," said Escalante in his diary. The priest was shocked by the heathen treatment - but one way or another, his compañero was cured.

From San Bartolomé they forged eastward to what now is milepost zero of the Colorado River - where the Paria River roars or trickles in, depending on how wet it is up near Bryce Canyon.

After nearly losing several porters who tried swimming the Colorado, they were fast abandoning all hope of seeing Santa Fe again.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. With all the courage they could muster, the not-so-hardy group scrambled straight up from the river, over broken shale, loose rocks, and near-vertical sand patches. Worn and weary, they reached the Paria Plateau - and faced more open-country trekking. Finally they found a ford across the water. The Crossing of the Fathers, which would be the main route across the Colorado for a century to come, today is covered by the clear, deep water of Lake Powell.

As 1777 began, the fathers were back home-with tales calculated to keep sane souls out of the wild lands north and west of the Colorado. That lonely land would remain a land apart for all but a few adventurers for years to come.

The wild bear-hunting Indian-fighting James Ohio Pattie may have left some footprints on the Strip-and a sense of relief at leaving it behind: "No mortal has the power of describing the pleasure I felt when I could once more reach the banks of the river," he said in his later-famous diary about the maddeningly tough travel along the Colorado in 1826.

Three years later, Antonio Armijo took a party of traders from Santa Fe, through the Colorado at El Vado de los Padres and onto the Strip, then all the way to Cali-fornia, with woolens woven in New Mexico. He came back the same way in 1830, open-ing trade across the Strip.

Then the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, moved in. Losing little time making the Salt Lake Valley a haven from religious persecution, Brigham Young's followers spread out.

To the south lay land traveled by the Mormon Battalion during the Mexican War. Young's visions of a land called Deseret went way beyond the borders of modern-day Utah: most of Arizona and Nevada, plus parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho fit his plans for a Mormon stronghold.

In 1858, Young sent Jacob Hamblin from southern Utah onto the Strip and toward the land of the Moqui-today's Hopis-to open trade and create friendly relations. With Chief Naraguts of the Kaibab Paiutes and a handful of Mormons, he began the adventuring that would make Hamblin a legend in that land.

He was big. He was bright. He was fearless in the face of a savage land and its often fearsome people. For nearly three decades, Hamblin was a white man Indians could trust-a man of his word.

Exploring their way into Arizona, below the escarpments of Utah's high plateaus, Hamblin's bunch came across the best-and most reliable-water supply on the Strip.

Camped at the spring, Hamblin's brother got to bragging about his shooting skills. "Gunlock Bill," he liked to be called-a real sure-shot. If you're so good, challenged some of his friends, let's see you shoot this silk scarf from a tree branch.

Bang! Missed. Bang! Missed again.

Then it occurred to him: his bullets were blowing the scarf out of the way instead of tearing the cloth. Time to try a real target. He'd shoot Dudley Leavitt's pipe out of his mouth at 25 paces. No thanks, said Leavitt-he'd put it on a rock. They bet Bill he couldn't blow away the bottom of the pipe without breaking the bowl. They lost-and the place won a name: Pipe Spring, in honor of Gunlock Bill Hamblin's fancy shooting.

Later, Dr. James Whitmore and Alexander McIntyre started a cattle ranch at the spring. They lived in a dugout on the side of Moccasin Canyon. They were killed by marauding Navajos in 1866.

The grasslands west of Kanab Creek were attractive cattle country, while Pipe Spring, spewing 60,000 gallons of pure water a day, was pure gold-and well worth protecting, as sporadic wars went on between Mormon and Navajo during the 1860s.

In 1870, Anson Winsor started building a fortified house with the spring inside its walls so attacking Indians couldn't divert or poison the water.

Strip Country THE LAND

The first boat in use at Lees Ferry in 1872 was the Cañon Maid, a scow abandoned by the Powell expedition. By the 1920s a sturdy barge, above, guided by steel cables plied the treacherous waters of the Colorado. Frequent accidents and occasional drownings plagued the crossing. Courtesy Arizona State Department of Library, Archives, and Public Records It's quite a fort. Sandstone from the cliffs above was towed down by oxen pulling “rock lizards”-forked logs with tines dragging, the forks holding the stones. Gun slots were set high on the walls so people could move around inside without risking a lucky-or unlucky-shot. By the time the fort was completed, the Mormons didn't need it. Not a shot was fired at it or from it. Hamblin had ventured all the way to Fort Defiance, on the New Mexico border, to sign a peace treaty with the Navajos. It never was brokenjust bent plenty by hotheads on both sides. Whenever an Anglo or an Indian would cry for blood, there was big Jacob Hamblin, peacemaker, talking sense and cooling tempers.

At Hamblin's side during some of his toughest moments was another Western legend: John Wesley Powell. The major made a name for himself with two daring voyages down the Green and Colorado rivers. The first, in 1869, was adventure of the highest order, as the one-armed hero of Shiloh and his handful of roughnecks braved a wild river that might have swallowed them up at any minute of the trip between Green River, Wyoming, and the mouth of the Virgin River.

Powell knew gallantry when he saw it. He became a friend and admirer of the Mormon “Leatherstocking” and was with him at Fort Defiance. When Powell turned his second voyage down the Colorado into a mapping survey of surrounding lands, Hamblin was a guide.

Their travels took them to Pipe Spring, where they talked long into a night. Powell loved the way the place got its name. To Hamblin, “Treachery Spring” would have been closer to the mark after the murder of Whitmore and McIntyre.

This land may be treacherous, Powell believed, but-as travelers today still know-it's intoxicatingly beautiful. “You cannot keep them away,” Powell warned of outsiders. He knew they'd be drawn to the eerie beauty of the Strip.

“Perhaps,” said Hamblin, “but few will stay.”

“Why so sure?”

Hamblin's answer is part of Paul Bailey's book, Jacob Hamblin, Buckskin Apostle: “What arable land there is has been taken. What water is left flows wild and uncontrolled down a canyon a mile deep in the earth. You can't sprout beans on slick rock. You can't grow corn in the desert. You've got to know this country to live in it.” Hamblin proved prophetic. The Arizona Strip today is home to about 3200 people-many of them descendants of the Mormons who ventured here a century ago and more.

Hamblin was a great-uncle of Adeline Johnson, who lives just three miles from Pipe Spring, at Moccasin. She's one of several women in the area who stage living history programs at Pipe Spring during the summer. She, monument guide Barbara Anderson, and several others bake honey-and-molasses cookies in a wood-burning stove. They piece together quilts. They spin, card, and weave wool dyed with natural coloring Mormon pioneers learned from the Indians: red juniper gives them red, red onion gives them green, alder-bark makes orange, and so on through the spectrum.

They also make butter and cheese, just the way Pipe Spring Ranch's women did in times long past, sending it by wagon along the Honeymoon Trail to workers on the temple at St. George.

Some of that butter and cheese still goes by wagon to St. George-in September, when horses and wagons are hitched up for the Honeymoon Trail Wagon Trek Pageant, celebrating those early trips to the temple.

Among the passengers are a couple who'll be married at trail's end. A regular on the trek since it started in 1975 as an American Bicentennial project is Adeline Johnson's husband, Owen. She remains on the Strip as a spiritual heiress to Hamblin's love for this rugged land. Owen's family also is part of the region's history.

His grandfather, Warren Marshall Johnson, ran Lees Ferry on the Strip's eastern end, when John D. Lee went into hiding for the last time.

Lee was one of 50 who shot down more than 100 men, women, and children on a California-bound wagon train in 1857: the Mountain Meadows Massacre. As a militia major, Lee was designated defendant.

But that meant bringing him to trialand try though federal prosecutors might, they couldn't catch Lee. He had been a step ahead of the law for 15 years when Hamblin saw possibilities in a ferry across the Colorado at the Paria. Beginning with a boat abandoned by Powell, then building flatboats, Lee and a wife made a home of “Lonely Dell,” a long way from the long arm of the law. When officers would come onto the Strip, Lee would leave for southern Utah or for his other homes along the Vermilion Cliffs.

Times were tense-but productive-for the hard-working Lee. Besides ranches, he had a shingle mill at Lonely Dell, and a lumber mill at Scutumpah in Utah. At the ferry, he traded with the Indians, and he exchanged Indian blankets for grape roots, shrubs, and seeds for land he irrigated from homemade dams. He made good money at the ferry: at 50 cents a horse, $3 a wagon, “the luggage and men thrownin," he made $46 one fine day in 1873. At last Lee's luck ran out. In September of 1876, an all-Mormon jury found him guilty of that long-ago massacre. He was taken back to Mountain Meadows the next year, where he sat on his coffin as the firing squad lined up. Raising his arms to give them a clear shot, Lee absorbed bullets and collective guilt over a dark chapter in Western history. Warren Johnson and his family became the church's new agents in charge of the ferry, which was becoming an important north-south transportation link. The Johnsons developed winching systems and figured out ways of making safer crossings of the treacherous river. As traffic and vehicles-got heavier, they came up with ever-bigger, ever-better vessels, until Navajo Bridge replaced the ferry in 1929. Toward the turn of the century, Lees Ferry became more than just a Colorado A federal fugitive for 17 years, John Doyle Lee, right, the scapegoat of the Mountain Meadows massacre, ran the ferry and farmed at the river crossing bearing his name. Lee's wife, Emma, seeing the location for the first time, remarked, "Oh, what a lonely dell!" Today, Lonely Dell, left, is a green oasis with mature orchards surrounding hand-hewn log cabins Lee built a century ago. Ed Cooper photo (Above) Lees Ferry Fort, actually a trading post and post office, over the years served as a school, a residence, and a mess hall. Bill Daniels photo

A wet weather cycle during the late 1800s turned the Arizona Strip into a verdant Eden. After pioneers homesteaded the western Strip, dry weather returned making ranching a struggle for survival. Some cattle graze on the Strip today, but most ranchers live in towns along the Arizona-Utah border. Only ghostly houses and weather-wracked corrals remain as haunting monuments to the tragic battle. (Left to right) A forsaken homestead at Wolf Hole. Sand Mountain, in the Warner Valley. A deserted corral near Mount Trumbull. Colorado City, on the Arizona-Utah border.

crossing-point: it was a stop for engineering surveys along the river, then the center of a gold rush. Placer mining was the way to wealth in many men's minds, and enormous hardware was hauled over this rugged land and down the steep, twisting trails to the Colorado. People panned, sluiced, and dredged up mud in massive quantitiesfor gold in small amounts. The prospectors got more adventure than money-and put in plenty of hard work amid beautiful surroundings. No one can ignore the natural wonders of the far-flung frontier across the Colorado, but lots of its luster was lost on folks who were there before comfortable cars could cross the Strip in a matter of hours.

Sharlot Hall, historian, photographer, writer, and adventurer, went by horse and wagon across the Strip in the summer of 1911. The diary of her journey eloquently expresses the land's magical effect on so many who've come to know it. She could enjoy "gorgeous sunsets," and all but ignore leaky wagoncovers, she was so crazy about the country. But at an abandoned ranch house in House Rock Valley, she found signs that others weren't nuts about it. Penciled on the walls were notes from other travelers who'd found shelter there: "Very grateful for Mr. House, especially for Mr. Fireplace. Gracia (sic) and adios. Wind blowing like hell." Another read, "Bound for Oregon; and I'll keep going. I may be crazy-but I haint no fool." Still another said, "Gee! What a lonesome place! Everything looks dreary; everything looks weary-to hell with this windy hole!" Finally, there was this early-century indictment of a state which now attracts masses from all parts of the country: "All the bad country in the U.S. was put together and they called it Arizona."

Hamblin was right: Folks who thrive in this land apart are the ones who know it. Owen Johnson knows the Strip-and he loves it. He spent his boyhood at Lees Ferry.

Sitting before a fireplace at his home in Moccasin, he recalls roundups in the wide open spaces of the Strip-and branding calves and trailing cattle from Kanab Creek area all the way up to the railroad towns of southwestern Utah. Trailing cattle meant three or four days of Old West adventure well into the 20th century for the families who teamed up for the horseback drive to the railhead: hard work, long hours, nights under the stars, and unforgettable fellowship. Times gone by? Not entirely. Living history at Pipe Spring National Monu-

18/Arizona Highways Magazine

A native of Bisbee, Arizona, Bill Waters writes editorials for the Arizona Republic of Phoenix. He holds degrees in English and law. His writing won an Overseas Press Club award. surroundings-and it gets the calves branded. Ranch life goes on.

That life-style has kept two of the Johnsons' sons on the Strip. David Johnson recently refused to let even a broken leg keep him off his horse. He rode a long way from anything like civilization when his jostled leg really started hurting, and he had to be carried out of some pretty rugged country.

Owen's grandson, Don, just back from a Mormon mission-couldn't wait to get back in the saddle-even though his arm was in a cast.

Ranch life never was for the faint of heart, but the dangers of life there are simple ones like being thrown from a horse, or being struck by a rattlesnake, not the complex kinds of danger folks face in the cities.

This place has been perfect for raising kids, says Mrs. Johnson. "Where are they? Oh, up climbing the hill, or out riding their horses; somewhere where they're not getting in trouble...."

It's not an easy life. The nearest doctor has been in Kanab, about 25 miles away. A new one is coming to Fredonia, though, lured by the peaceful life of this land apart.

"Out here," says Mrs. Johnson, "we can our own fruit and raise our own vegetables in a garden. There's not much we really have to buy from a store-we're pretty independent."

Life also is pretty simple down the road in Fredonia. Founded in 1885, it has been a quiet town for years.

Since the mid-70s Fredonia has been growing. Its population has doubled past the 1000 mark as Kaibab Industries' sawmill on the south side of town and Energy Fuels' uranium-mining headquarters on the north bring in new jobs.

Fredonia also has an oil refinery, out of keeping with the area, prompted by Four Corners energy development.

Those industries have meant new people and changing times for the town and for its mayor, Dixie Judd. Her husband, Veldon, works for the United States Forest Service. They're active in a community which has put in a lighted baseball field and has made major improvements to Main Streetalso known as 89A.

Fredonia got its first bank last year and has recently formed a chamber of commerce. That group realizes Fredonia is a gateway to the Grand Canyon and could be attracting some of the many travelers who now stop in Kanab, seven miles north, across the Utah line.

Fredonia centennial celebrations, now being planned, could provide some of the impetus for making the town a major part of what attracts travelers to the land north of the Colorado.

Perhaps nowhere on the Strip does the notion of being a land apart have more impact than on Fredonia High School. It's a center of community, cultural, and athletic activity, but the Fredonia Lynx must go a long way to play: 1000 miles round trip to Salome and a good 700 to Phoenix in search of Class C competition.

Still, support for school activities is strong, enthusiasm high.

The town may lose many of its youngsters when high school is over, as so many towns do, but its low-pressure life-style also holds some. Like so much of the Strip, Fredonia retains lots of people who know this land; whose ancestors explored and settled it.

Today's transportation and communications keep the people of this country as much in touch with the world as they'd be in cities anywhere in Arizona; yet minutes from home, they're amid surroundings as primitive as they were when the first bootheels gouged the colorful soil of a land apart.

Arizona Highways Magazine/19

Sunlight, Shadow, and Slickrock: Portraits and Impressions of the Strip's Awesome Natural Boundary

The river streams down its mysterious reaches, hurrying ceaselessly; sometimes a smooth sliding Hap, sometimes a falling, broken wilderness of billows and whirlpools. Above stand its walls, rising through space upon space of silence. They glow, they gloom, they shine. Owen Wister

The huge stones were beasts, I used to think, of a kind man ordinarily lived too fast to understand. They seemed inanimate because the tempo of life in them was slow. They lived ages in one place and moved only when man was not looking. Loren Eiseley

Nature herself has built the walls around this treasure vault, and it is not strange that she has kept her secrets so well. Sharlot M. Hall