“It's a helluva a place to lose a cow.” – attributed to Ebenezer Bryce
…continued from Ebenezer Bryce: Part 3
In 1876, the Bryce family traded their house in Pine Valley for a flock of sheep and moved 160 miles east to Paria Creek. There they would homestead a portion of what is now known as Bryce Canyon National Park. Yes, that park, visited by more than 2 million people every year, is named after my great-great grandfather.
The area is made up of rocky cliffs, horseshoe-shaped canyons, sprawling plateaus, forests of ponderosa pine and fir-spruce, and “hoodoos.” These unique geological formations are the result of the accumulation of flat rocks in the ancient Lake Claron, the same plate tectonics that created the Colorado Plateau, and some long-term weathering and erosion—specifically “ice wedging.” This last step, undertaken over the course of millions of years, transformed a wide plateau into narrower “walls,” carved out “windows,” and finally, whittled the rocks down into spires or “shafts.” (Now, people travel from far and wide to see the creatively named hoodoos of Bryce Canyon, particularly Thor’s Hammer, The Hunter, and Queen Victoria.)
The Bryce family settled in what was essentially sheer desert, at the base of the canyon between what is now Cannonville and Tropic. Not the most hospitable place to set up camp, though archeological evidence suggests that humans have inhabited the area for thousands of years. While traveling through, “Paleoindians” left darts and spear points dated to the end of the last Ice Age. Fremont and Pueblo Cultures set up agricultural communities in and nearby the canyon that lasted for a thousand years, starting around 1000 C.E. Then came the Southern Paiute Indians, who hunted and gathered there for a few hundred years, called the hoodoos Anka-ku-was-a-wits, or “red-painted faces,” followed by the white men of the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition of 1776, Mexican traders in the 1820s, and frontiersmen after that. A few years before my family arrived in the area east of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, Black Hawk War broke out between white settlers and Native Americans, which led to the Navajo, Ute, and Southern Paiute nations’ resettlement. (As noted in an earlier blog post about my friend Hana, whose family, along with more than 13,000 Japanese Americans, was “relocated” during World War II, this region has a long history of such enforced resettlement.)
Ebenezer and his sons’ first order of business was to dig an irrigation ditch to channel water from Paria Creek to their land and built a road into the canyon so that they could transport logs to build a cabin, barns, fences, and firewood. People from Cannonville three miles to the south also came to rely on the road, eventually referring to the canyon itself as Bryce’s canyon. On June 8, 1923, this informal title became official when the U.S. Forest Service established the area as a national monument. Five years later, almost 36,000 acres were re-designated as a national park.
Rumor has it that Ebenezer, never one to mince words, said of the canyon, “It's a helluva of a place to lose a cow.”
A few decades later, my late wife, Gloria, and I went to visit the national park. After a couple hours of scenic driving, we pulled up to the fee station at the visitor’s center, where the nice young attendant was ready for us to pay our $30 fee. In the passenger’s seat, Gloria leaned forward and said, “This right here is the great-great grandson of Ebenezer Bryce. As in, Bryce Canyon. We should get in for free.”
“Nah,” he said, clearly thinking she was pulling his leg.
“Go on, Herb,” Gloria whispered to me. “Show him your ID.” I took my wallet out of my pocket, pulled out my license, and handed it to the attendant. He examined it closely, looked up at me, and said, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Then he let us in for free.