Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  YOU CAN tell a lot about how people regard a certain area by what they call it. On the counter inside the lone federal government outpost in the town of Escalante, a uniformed BLM clerk is helping me with a map that unfolds to the size of an Amsterdam hotel room. Every square mile is colored by ownership—federal, state, Indian, private. Most of it is run by the BLM, landlord for one-eighth of the continental United States, an agency trying to shed an old tag as the Bureau of Livestock and Mining. In Utah alone, they manage twenty-two million acres. The place I am trying to get to must have been cursed and vilified; the names evoke eternal damnation or futility. There is a Devils Hob, a Devils Toys, a Devils Rock Garden (they have long dropped the possessive apostrophe), a Dirty Devil River, a Dirty Devil River Overlook, a Death Hollow, a Little Death Hollow, a Box Death Hollow, Carcass Canyon, Death Ridge, Last Chance Gulch. And then there are names that evoke Mormons unbound, or libidos powered by the desert sun: the Bishops Prick, Brighams Unit, Nipple Butte, Nipple Bench, Cads Crouch.

  The broader area honors Father Silvestre Velez de Escalante, one of two friars who wandered northwest of the Spanish missions in New Mexico in 1776, trying to find a way around the Grand Canyon and the Apache country to get to California, where, in the same year that the Declaration of Independence was penned, the mission that would grow to become San Francisco was established above the Golden Gate. Father Velez de Escalante, the Curious George of Franciscan missionaries, never made it to California, but he certainly saw a lot of the country, going as far north as the place where Provo is today and west through Bryce Canyon, down the Virgin River near Zion, to the rim of the Grand Canyon, and back. When John Wesley Powell came through the region in 1871, on his second expedition to the Colorado Plateau, he named the last major range of peaks in the country, The Unknown Mountains became the Henry Mountains. He surveyed the Escalante River, which drains much of the canyon country of southeastern Utah to the Colorado River, putting it for the first time on Anglo maps of the West. Prospectors and Mormon colonists followed, and in their general disappointment, left behind the names printed on my BLM map.

  Later came the National Geographic Society, heralding the red rock country as a place of wonder. The struggle between those who fear, exploit, or misunderstand the land and those who are open to its grandeur was evident in the descriptions of southern Utah by the exploring society from Washington, D.C. They were astonished at the ruins, the rock art, the desert clarity. A valley with monolithic chimneys, considered godforsaken by many in Utah, was named Kodachrome Basin. A dome was named for the Capitol. And on this place where heaven and hell, death and rejuvenation, sex and privation compete on the map, I want only to find a little space for discovery.

  IN THE BLM office are blowups of petroglyphs from the area; it is like going into a small town to get a fishing license and seeing the trophy trout snapshots on the wall. My juices are flowing. I’m itching to get started.

  “Most of these places I can’t tell you about,” says the BLM clerk. “They are Class Two or Class Three sites.” Under the Archaeological Resource Protection Act, the government has designated three levels for rock art and ruins: Class I is open to viewing by anyone, Class 2 is open but usually remains off trail maps and a ranger does not have to describe its location, and Class 3 is off limits to anyone except by permit for scholarly or guided tours. The sketches, carvings, and shards of a civilization went untouched for a thousand years; but in the last hundred years they have been trashed.

  The natives who followed the Anasazi, but were not descended from them, refused to touch the stuff. The Utes considered them haunted; making contact with an Anasazi relic was like opening an infection path to the soul. The Spanish called the stone etchings piedras pintadas (painted rocks) and generally left them alone. Don Juan de Oñate, however, in the last days of his tortured wanderings and ill-fated attempt at nation-building, was impelled to scratch his own marks at El Morro Rock in 1605—a boast of his explorations and a bitter editorial comment on how much the whole thing was costing him personally. In the late 1890s, a rancher named Dick Wetherill and his brother Al, a cowboy, unearthed stone tools, basketry, weavings, and funerary items in the dry caves of Grand Gulch, Utah. What soon became more interesting to the Wetherills than their cows was the emerging idea that there had been a big civilization in the very places that had been written off as worthless and uninhabitable. Cities, monuments, amphitheaters, roads, ball courts, and religious centers—a veritable Ancient Greece—lie just beneath the red dust. Dick Wetherill was one of the first to distinguish between the early basketmakers, who lived in the region until about A.D. 600, and the black-on-white pottery artists and cliff dwellers of several hundred years later. He was also one of the first to profit from the find. The Wetherills guided mule trains of artifacts out of the sites and back to their ranch. They sold to museums and collectors around the country, and were even hired by the states of Utah and Colorado to take treasures from the ruins back to the World’s Fair in Chicago. An archaeological gold rush followed, the old city sites and open-air art walls were plundered in behalf of museums and schools, or by people who just wanted a thousand-year-old water jug for their fireplace mantel. By the mid-1950s, a group of scientists who went looking to study an undisturbed archaeological site in Utah could not find such a place. Virtually every known site had been looted.

  The worst of the plunderers, a person who has taunted federal officials and scientists for years, is Earl K. Shumway, a convicted burglar who comes from a long line of Indian grave robbers. The elder Shumways and other pioneering Mormon families were hired in the 1920s by the University of Utah to furnish pots for the campus museum. They were given two dollars for every piece of Anasazi pottery. Lesser pieces, deemed inferior, were batted around and smashed up like spoiled tomatoes. A third-generation thief, Earl Shumway dug up his first grave at an early age, in the late 1950s. By then, cultural poaching was no longer sanctioned by universities or museums, but it was still an accepted way to make a living in small towns of southern Utah. Earl Shumway used bulldozers to scrape away some Indian sites, and hired helicopters to get him into other areas. When asked in 1988 how many Anasazi sites he had disturbed, he said he had lost count, but that it was probably in the thousands. He bragged that his chances of getting caught were one in a million. Shumway sold his artifacts to dealers, who peddled them in Europe, where a piece of art or a shank of an ancient civilization fetched It’s highest price.

  In the American West, Shumway was long considered something of a nuisance, but little else. Despite the evidence against him, and his considerable bragging, prosecutors were reluctant to seek an indictment, saying it would be hard to get a conviction in rural Utah. He was a “pothunter,” one of many, a term that makes It’s bearers sound no more harmful than a rancher or weekend hobbyist. To the Hopi, who have complained the most about the desecration of ancestral sites in Utah, Shumway was scum; they called him a “moki poacher”—someone who robs from the dead. Imagine if a thief were going through Arlington National Cemetery, they asked, digging up Civil War graves and selling off bits and pieces of the tombstones.

  When Shumway was first convicted, in 1980, he was one of the first people ever fully prosecuted under the Archaeological Protection Act. He was fined $700 and put on probation. And, of course, he went right back to doing what he had always done, except that he became a full-time grave robber, instead of a mere hobbyist. Sometimes he earned $10,000 a day, he said. By the mid-1990s, the government went after him again, obtaining numerous indictments, and this time, putting him in jail for a sentence of more than twenty years. Among his final acts, he had stripped away funeral blankets from the bones of children and ripped open graves inside Canyon-lands National Park.

  “This is a devastating crime against our culture and our history,” Wayne Dance, the United States Attorney for Utah, told me. The fact that he called it “our culture and our history” was telling, considering that much of the red rock country is named for the devil and
that people like Shumway have long been paid to steal from it.

  The poaching, chipping, and grave-robbing have gotten worse, the BLM agent in Escalante says. From Boy Scouts on organized camping trips to passers-through who don’t know any better, everyone wants a piece of the past. But with every piece that is taken, every site that is touched, the chance to decipher the Anasazi mysteries slips further away. I feel a bit taken aback; all I want, I tell myself, is to feel the connection between artist and audience, to get the adrenaline rush of discovery.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this,” says the BLM clerk. “But if you go in this general direction…”—she points to a place on a wall map—“you’ll see some amazing things.”

  Car and Driver magazine did a recent survey to determine the most remote area in the United States outside of Alaska. The answer: the red rock country of southeastern Utah. It was the last place penetrated by the automobile, for obvious reasons. Putting a line of pavement over this stretch of rumpled rock would seem to be impossible. Much of the land is like the spiky spine of a dinosaur. In hues of rust and salmon are eroded benches, rib-caged cliffs, arches, bridges, plateaus, and canyons. The one paved road that was finally put in place, Highway 12, covers barely enough ground to fit a lane of traffic each way, in parts. I follow blinding hairpin turns, get swallowed by open chasms, and then rise again to ride the dinosaurs twisty spine. The town of Boulder is a few tumbledown ranches and not much else on one side of the highway. Population: 112. Next to Boulder are the ruins of another town, an Anasazi village abandoned about the year 1200. It had had perhaps two hundred people, judging by the foundation. I walk around the old village with Larry Davis, a state archaeologist; for twenty-five years he has been trying to understand this place.

  “Reach your hand down on the ground and take a scoop of that dirt,” he says.

  I do so, bringing up a handful of dry sand and pebble pieces.

  “Now, look at this …” He sorts through the scoop and finds a few small pieces, not pebbles at all, but bits of clay. When he blows on them, a small paint design is evident. The effect is electric, a touch with the ancients. “Those are pottery shards.”

  Every day he walks this ghost village, finding pieces of the larger puzzle. Some of them fit; most do not. He has the community outlined to a point where he can imagine what went on virtually every hour of the day.

  “I’m not sure the locals see the beauty or the point of any of this,” he says. “I’ve had people say to me, ‘How much can you learn from the Anasazi?’ ”

  A chilling wind has started to blow through the ruins. We are at nearly seven thousand feet, and I feel the slap of cold. “What can you learn? How to live. Mistakes to avoid. These people had quite a culture, and then they left in the thirteenth century. This area is not real fertile, but they made it work. And with good times, population increased. It got crowded, and then things went bad. They couldn’t support themselves. The whole civilization crashed.” Skeletal remains suggest that some Anasazi children died of malnutrition and pneumonia. The woods around some of the village are still denuded, all the timber cleared for firewood and building.

  The exodus was supposed to be temporary, Davis believes. “A few years ago I went down into one of the canyons, where there was a real find. There was a doorway into a room full of stuff. Not a burial site. The doorway was sealed. It was obvious—these folks planned on coming back.”

  AT A high point on the road, I stop and look, because a sign says this is a place where you can see everything and nothing. The everything is a view of all the red rock country and beyond—the distant Henry Mountains, the Aquarius Plateau, and the Kaiparowits Plateau, where the Dutch-owned mining company wants to start trucking out coal night and day over the next quarter of a century. The nothing is just that, no signs of industrial intrusion, no roads or power lines, none of the brown air that gathers well to the north in the Salt Lake Valley. The plateau is atop a wall nearly fifty miles long, rising six hundred feet from below. In her essays Terry Tempest Williams is always talking about places in the West where you can “listen to the silence.” The silence is loud at this promontory. The sign says the best view is at night, with Orion overhead and utter blackness everywhere else.

  When Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—needed a place to hide after a string of bank robberies, down below is where they went, to Robbers Roost. And the point at which Robert Redford, the actor who played Sundance in the film, realized he loved Utah more than any state was when Robbers Roost was imperiled. The plan in 1970 was to run a string of coal-fired power plants across the red rock country, all the way to Montana. It would look like parts of the former Soviet Union, black and steely, clanking with noise, the purple soot obscuring the canyon views so that people could run air conditioners in Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. Redford stopped making movies for a while and devoted his time to keeping the coal-fired power plants out of the arid West. He was tarred, feathered, and burned in effigy in Kanab, a town that could be the future headquarters for the Dutch-owned mining company. After that plan failed, Senator Hatch introduced a bill to give most of the five hundred million acres of public land in the West to the states, counties, and private owners. Americans, apparently, were not to be trusted with their public land.

  I drive an hour or so from the high vistas, away from the places the National Geographic Society visited, and go deeper into the canyons named for hell and the devil. I find a gulch where green water about ten feet wide and no more than three feet deep is loping downward, inevitably toward the Colorado. It seems perfect. The rare ribbons of water in the red rock country were major travel corridors, campsites, and playgrounds for the Anasazi. They loved to mark the walls of the life-giving arteries coursing through their land. I park and set out along a dirt and pebbled path bordering the creek. There are no campsites or picnic tables; somebody has removed the trailhead sign. The canyon bottom is stuffed with cottonwoods, willows, and cacti and is much warmer than the high ground above. I don’t know where I’m going except to the next bend in the river. Light fills the ravine, sun reflecting off the water to the high sandstone walls. Growth-stunted pinyon pines have latched on to small sandholds of the rock. I’m looking for gold, my stake. And since Orrin Hatch’s bill went nowhere, this land remains open and free to the wandering soul. The eye starts to see things: Is that a sketch of a hunt, or just another place where the rust bleeds out of the rock? Where is that little flute-playing hunchback with the hard-on?

  The ancients would typically find a high, smooth surface of vertical stone covered with the dark brown patina known as desert varnish, a color that develops over centuries of oxidation of the rock’s minerals. To create a typical petroglyph, a tool was used to scrape a lighter image into the varnish, which looks white in poor light. For pictographs, black from charcoal, red from hematite, and white from kaolin were ground into dust and mixed with oil from animals, plants, or urine. It binds and holds as well as the paint plaster of a frescoed church wall.

  In the late afternoon, I’m sunburned and running low on water, but I feel like Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of Sierra Madre, wanting to push on, obsessed. Two women approach from the opposite direction. They, too, look pink and parched, but they have a postdiscovery glow about them.

  “Keep going, another mile or so, and then start to look up,” one of them says.

  I don’t really want this bit of intelligence; I’m trying to keep my discovery journey pure. But I drain them of details. Exactly how far up the canyon? Which rocks? How high up?

  “There are some smaller glyphs at first. Just look at eye level along the rocks as you go,” she says. “That’s when you know you Ye getting closer. It’s going to be a little hard to get up to the bigger ones.”

  “You might have to wade,” her friend says.

  “It’s worth it.”

  Now my feet are wet, and my skin is raw from bug bites and sun. Blister my feet and let the deerflies have at me, the c
arnivorous little bastards. This is not cheap scenery. I don’t care if I run out of water or have to live for days off the remains of a microwave enchilada from the Escalante mini-mart. By late afternoon, with perhaps an hour of light left in the canyon, I am starting to despair. I have seen some small, intriguing petroglyphs, as the hikers had said. But nothing else. I have struck out. I go into the river and dunk my head; it’s a brisk, cleansing douse. My lightweight hiking shoes, which I treat like sandals, are a nag. The water squirts out of them as I walk; it’s neither rhythmic nor comfortable.

  The canyon gets wider and deeper, and there are more trees, older and thicker in the basin. Plenty of oaks, some very solid pines, and junipers. It’s an oasis, green and blue. And above it, the rock could not be more polished if it had been quarried for Michelangelo, rising hundreds of feet straight up. The geologic lines, the colors from epochs of violence and fire, are clearly drawn, as are the horizontal markers from a time when the stream was much deeper. I gaze up a side canyon, and there I see something red, tall, and asymmetrical. But it looks as if it belongs.

  Heart racing, I gallop across the stream and stumble toward the rock wall in the side canyon. I hurdle the seven-foot width of the smaller spring channel. I see it now, a wonderful, three-figured pictograph, as wide as a movie screen. It is enormous, multidimensional, and high above the canyon floor, fifty feet or more. The artist must have labored from a tall ladder for days in order to sketch the panel, for the river line is well below the picture. I take dozens of pictures, from myriad angles, moving as close as I can get to the very base of the wall. The pictograph is of three people, perhaps holding hands, but they are so tightly linked that they look welded to one another, as if forming a single living unit. They have somewhat triangular upper bodies—a common feature of the late Anasazi basketmaker period, around A.D. 600—and their shoulders are padded, well above the arm muscles. I cannot tell if they are men or women; they are without legs, their bodies cut off just above the knees, which makes them appear to be floating. Atop their heads are horns, or antennae, or some sort of headdress. The picture says Welcome, or if I were in a bad mood, Go away. Then I see something I’d missed up to this point: a suspended figure, many legs, no real chest, a head, just below the three humans. A shaman? A guard? A guide to another world? The entire pictograph leaves me without a clear sense of whether the artist was saying goodbye after five hundred years, with the humans following the suspended multilegged traveler, or signaling a new era.