A Persistent Place

Tiny national monument tells a big story

During the nearly two years we have been roaming the West in Next Chapter, Leslie and I have learned to focus less on covering ground than on inhabiting it.

Our camper van has an extra-large fuel tank, and distances are vast in this part of the country. If there is something magnificent at the heart of a planned excursion — Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, for example, or the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in Colorado — it is tempting to try to eat up the mileage between here and there as quickly as possible. This makes for long days behind the wheel, and on our first few trips in the van it was not uncommon for us to log between 400 and 500 miles a day for several days in a row.

Not only is that exhausting, it turns a road trip into a blur rather than an adventure. And although this might have been a necessary evil when we were both working full time, and had to squeeze any adventures into the finite space of our allotted annual vacation leave, it is less of an imperative now that we are (mostly) retired. So we’ve begun making a conscious effort to plan travel itineraries that include shorter driving days between destinations, and layovers that allow us to sink more deeply into specific places: To get to know how sunlight and shade dance over them in the long summer hours between dawn and dusk; to grow attuned to the particular chorus of birdsong twittered by the local avifauna; to laze in a hammock with a beer and a book; to wander the local trails in search of beauty, or understanding, or both.

The gentler travel pace also allows for the serendipity of impromptu side excursions when something interesting pops up along the road. Which is how we found ourselves at Pipe Spring National Monument in Arizona last spring, learning a well-crafted lesson about the tangled relationships among cultures and peoples in the West, both across long spans of time and within particular historical moments. It’s a story of conflict, appropriation, dispossession, doggedness and determination — common elements of history throughout much of the United States, but focused in this case through the lens of a very particular place.

Dramatic scenery and charismatic wildlife are not the focus at Pipe Spring. The region’s complicated human story is the point.

Water in a desert

Archaeologists have a term for an area on the landscape that is the focus of repeated human activity over time. This does not always mean a place where people settled long ago and never left, continuously inhabiting it for centuries; sometimes it is a place where people arrived, settled or just made artistic marks on the neighborhood stone, and eventually left, followed by others who did the same, the cycle repeating over thousands of years and involving people with different cultural traditions. Archaeologists refer to these as “persistent places” — a term I find useful for understanding not just large patterns of human settlement but also my own affinity for certain locations that draw me back to them time and time again.

Pipe Spring is a persistent place. To a large degree, this is because of its nearly unique physical attribute: The spring to which its name refers is a perennial source of fresh water in a desert. It has long been a magnet for settlement, as well as birds, mammals and other non-human critters.

Water in the desert: Pipe Spring National Monument. (John Krist photo)

Many persistent places similarly share availability of scarce but critical resources as a defining characteristic. Others, however, seem to share something else entirely, some invisible but undeniable attraction. It’s as if they channel some ineffable power, perhaps because of a particular alignment of mesas, buttes, canyons, cliffs and alcoves, that pulls people to them and convinces them to stay. I’m not fond of metaphysical explanations for why certain places just seem more welcoming than others, but I also know that I have felt that tug myself during my explorations of the West over the past half century. Some places just feel good. Sometimes they feel like home.

Pipe Spring is in a region known as the Arizona Strip, a semiarid chunk of the state landlocked between the formidable barriers of the Colorado River and Grand Canyon to the south, and the vertiginous cliffs of southern Utah’s great sedimentary stone staircase to the north. It’s both a natural east-west travel corridor and a realm isolated by geology.

The spring itself is a product of that geology: Permeable sandstone layers in the nearby Vermillion Cliffs allow rain and snowmelt to percolate downward until they reach impermeable layers of rock. The water then flows between these layers underground until forced to the surface by faults like the one at Pipe Spring.

Wandering hunter-gatherers likely frequented the Strip for thousands of years, but the earliest evidence of full-time residents in the Pipe Spring neighborhood dates to about 300 BC, with remnants of pit-house villages occupied by the Ancestral Pueblo people. Originally hunters and gatherers themselves, they eventually shifted to farming and constructed above-ground communal dwellings. Like their counterparts elsewhere in the Four Corners region, they left these settlements between 1000 and 1500 AD, drifting to more resource-rich environments elsewhere in the Southwest as drought and population pressure made their way of life untenable in the Strip.

In their place (and perhaps even alongside them for some time) semi-nomadic Southern Paiute bands occupied the Pipe Spring area. They lived more lightly on the land, moving seasonally to hunt and gather wild plant foods, cultivated corn and beans, and lived in dwellings constructed of juniper wood and brush. Although Spanish missionaries passed through the area in 1776, they did not stay, and it wasn’t until the 1860s that the Paiute acquired permanent neighbors.

This did not go well for the Paiute.

Although periodic raids by neighboring Utes and Navajos had taken their toll on the Paiutes, the more significant threat to their way of life arrived in the form of Mormon ranchers, who began moving into the Strip and settling near water sources in the 1860s. The Pipe Spring area, known as Antelope Valley, was lush grassland then, and a rancher named James Whitmore claimed title to 160 acres surrounding the water source in 1863, stocking it with sheep and cattle.

Soon, the Navajo raiding parties refocused their attention on livestock, leading to a series of violent confrontations that resulted in Whitmore’s death in 1866. The Mormon Church subsequently acquired the property from Whitmore’s widow, and in 1870 began constructing a fortified ranch house enclosing the main springs, as a defense against future raids. It also developed the ranch as home for a “tithing herd” (members typically gave a tenth of their income annually to the church, making their contributions in livestock rather than cash in areas like the Strip), which produced meat, milk, butter and cheese for sale in the nearby settlement of St. George, Utah.

Meanwhile, the Paiute, elbowed off their traditional land, found wild game and native plant foods diminishing as thousands of head of livestock consumed the available forage. As the Mormon settlement at Pipe Spring grew, the Paiute dwindled, afflicted by disease and hunger.

A series of federal laws making polygamy illegal prompted the church to sell the Pipe Spring ranch in 1895 to avoid having it confiscated by the government. The ranch remained a way station for travelers, traders and cowboys for a number of years after that, a rare place of respite in a landscape largely empty of commerce, convenience or hospitality.

In 1907, the federal government established the Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation, returning a fragment of their traditional homeland to what remained of the tribe. The ranch and Pipe Spring, however, remained in private hands until 1923, when it was declared a national monument. Today, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians has about 250 members, and the reservation encompasses 120,000 acres surrounding the monument.

“Winsor Castle” at Pipe Spring. (John Krist photo)

Off the beaten path

The monument is small, only 40 acres, and far from the higher-profile attractions of southern Utah and Northern Arizona such as Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon. Leslie and I were driving from St. George toward Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, and our pending rendezvous with a pair of slot canyons, when we saw a sign on the lonely highway pointing to the Pipe Spring entrance road. On my previous travels through the area I’d wondered about what I’d find at the end of that road, but I never seemed to have time to detour.

We had time. So we turned off the highway. It was a good decision.

The main visual attraction at the monument is the old fortress, referred to as “Winsor Castle” after Anson Winsor, the first manager of the Mormon ranch there. But the visitor center is where the real meaning of Pipe Spring can be found. The center is jointly operated by the National Park Service and the Kaibab Band, and the exhibits and interpretive materials reflect a nuanced perspective on the cultural forces that collided long ago in this isolated landscape. It’s a difficult and complicated story, but it is very well told. We spent more than an hour there, before touring the grounds and the old buildings. We then retired to Next Chapter to eat lunch and reflect on what we’d learned, before heading to that night’s camping destination.

There are 423 units in the National Park System. Only 63 technically are “National Parks”; the remainder fall into a dizzying array of formal categories: National Battlefields (11 units), National Battlefield Parks (4), National Battlefield Sites (1), National Military Parks (9), National Historical Parks (62), National Historic Sites (73), International Historic Sites (1), National Lakeshores (3), National Memorials (31), National Monuments (84), National Parkways (4), National Preserves (19), National Reserves (2), National Recreation Areas (18), National Rivers (4), National Wild and Scenic Rivers and Riverways (10), National Scenic Trails (3), and National Seashores (10).

I think of that as an inventory of opportunities for adventure, both physical and intellectual. There are so many more serendipitous side trips — so many stories — awaiting us on the road.

Boondocking in Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, Utah. (John Krist photo)

Sego lily, state flower of Utah, Vermillion Cliffs. (John Krist photo)