A bit of water voices diverse human stories in Northern Arizona
Water defines the arid west.
Sporadic and intermittent water - think flash floods, freeze/thaw and
steady erosion - sculpts the landscape, but it takes permanent water to create conditions
for human settlement. At Pipe Spring
National Monument in northern Arizona, the Park Service has done an
exemplary job of telling the human water story from three perspectives:
Paiutes, the original inhabitants; Mormons, a big wave of Anglo settlers that
stayed; and the U.S. government.
Pipe Spring gets it start as rainfall. About 10-12 inches fall here every year, but
only an inch works its way through the red sandstone and into the aquifer. When that water hits the impermeable mudstone
layer below the sandstone, it finds its way to the surface creating springs along
the base of the red sandstone mesas.
There are actually five springs at Pipe Spring and they have supported
human habitation since the ancestral Puebloans lived in the region some one
thousand years ago. Because of this
generous and reliable source of water, there was historically and still is a
well-worn trail to Pipe Spring. Remnants
of the historic wagon road leading to the site are visible from the mesa above
the spring. Today the trail is Arizona
Highway 389.
When catholic missionaries seeking a route from Santa Fe to
California first showed up in 1776, Paiute Indians lived in the area and used
water from Pipe Spring to grow beans, squash and corn. Anglo ranchers began utilizing the water in
the late 1850s and in 1863, James Whitmore, a Mormon Rancher, homesteaded the land
around and including the spring for his 11,000 sheep and 500 cattle. Meanwhile, Kit Carson was busy displacing the
Navajo Nation from their ancestral lands.
Displaced parties of Navajo were raiding in the Pipe Spring region and they
killed Whitmore and a ranch hand in 1866 as Whitmore sought to recover stolen
cattle. Only local ranchers thought it
was the Paiutes who killed Whitmore and the ranch hand, causing a conflict that
really shouldn’t have happened. The
Paiutes were not an aggressive people and they had co-existed with the Mormons
and shared Pipe Spring since the first contact with Mormon ranchers.
Our NPS Interpretive Ranger, Miranda, noted that
individually Paiutes and Mormons got along quite well. The Church didn’t subscribe to the “only good
Indian is a dead Indian” mentality that was prevalent at this time in our
history, though there were some armed conflicts between Mormons and local
tribes. Seeing Native Americans as the
lost tribe of Israel, the church sought to work with and live with these
indigenous peoples. And there was a
tremendous push to convert the Paiute to Mormonism, which didn’t work out very
well. Culturally there was continual
conflict and misunderstanding over concepts of values, religion and land
ownership. For example, Paiutes could
not understand why Mormon settlers could shoot deer whenever they wanted, but
the Paiute could not shoot cows.
Winsor Castle
The perceived threat from the Paiute, caused by the misunderstanding
over who killed Whitmore, and continuing raids by the Navajo ultimately led to
the construction of a small stone fortress over the main spring area after
Brigham Young purchased Pipe Spring from Whitmore’s widow in 1870. Effectively cut off from water they had used
for centuries, the Paiute were forced away from the spring and lands they desperately
needed for survival. Many Paiute died of
disease or moved away as there was no federal government assistance, no treaty
and, therefore, no local reservation until 1907.
Inside Winsor Castle
This small stone fortress, called Winsor
Castle after the first ranch manager Anson Winsor, was constructed between
1870 and 1872 by 40 men from the Mormon Church.
Red sandstone was quarried locally, but the roof timbers had to be cut
and hauled from as far away as 50 miles.
The church used Whitmore’s ranch and Pipe Spring as a “tithing”
ranch. The Mormon Church required a 10%
tithe from its members, many of whom could not pay in cash. So they paid annually in cattle and sheep
which were raised on church owned ranches.
Milk cows from Pipe Spring generated 40 pounds of butter and 60 pounds
of cheese every day! They also
cultivated and irrigated a 10 acre garden that included pear and apple trees. A couple times a month, wagons of produce,
butter and cheese along with several dozen steers were sent to feed the workers
building the Mormon Temple in St. George, a three day wagon ride away.
Sitting Room inside Winsor Castle
Ranger Miranda gave an excellent tour of Winsor Castle,
which the Park Service has meticulously restored to what it looked like in the
1870s. Tours start on the hour from 10
am to 3 pm daily. The house is built
like a fort with high stone walls and thick wooden gates, but it was never
attacked. The tour starts on the first
floor sitting room and dining room.
Upstairs are the sleeping quarters, including a “bridal suite” for newly
married Mormon couples traveling to and from the Temple in St. George where
their marriages were sealed by the church.
Telegraph connected Winsor Castle to Salt Lake City
Something that really caught my attention was a telegraph
wire on the balcony leading into the house.
We learned from Ranger Miranda that even before the house was
constructed, Brigham Young had decreed that the far-flung outposts of the
Mormon empire would be linked by telegraph to Salt Lake City. Post-Civil War there was plenty of telegraph
wire to be had cheaply. Brigham Young
took advantage of its availability to string 995 miles of wire linking remote
sites, like Pipe Spring, from Idaho to Arizona.
The telegraph operators were all single women who had their own space on
the Castle’s first floor, just above the basement room built over the
spring. The spring kept this basement
room cool where butter and cheese were stored.
There is an RV park owned by the Kanab Paiute adjacent to
the monument, but we had been camping for a month so sought out a real bed for
a couple nights in Kanab, Utah. About 30
minutes from Pipe Spring, Kanab is the place for lodging and restaurants and it
boasts of a long history supporting mostly western movies and TV shows filmed
in the area. There is interesting movie trivia signage all over town. Pipe
Spring can be seen in the TV series Death Valley Days and the film Last of the
Mohicans. And at the visitor center, I
learned that Winsor Castle was the inspiration for the Withersteen Ranch in
Zane Grey’s “Riders of the Purple Sage.”
Kanab hosts an excellent book store/coffee shop/outdoor store (a
wonderful combination) and several good restaurants, including our favorite,
the Flying V Café. For a quick bite and
a local beer after visiting Pipe Spring, we drove a short 18 miles to Colorado
City, Arizona and the Edge of The World Brewery. For a town historically steeped in Mormon
fundamentalism, it was quite a treat to discover good pizza and cold beer!
The government first interacted with Pipe Spring when John
Wesley Powell based out of the area while surveying the lands north of the
Grand Canyon. It was his survey that
placed these lands not in the predominantly Mormon Utah, but rather in
Arizona. Powell was the first government
representative to suggest federal support in the form of food and farm land for
the Paiute. No one in Washington
listened until 1907 when the General Land Office withdrew 138,000 acres for the
Kanab Paiute. The next big government
influence came in 1920 when Stephen Mather, the first Director of the National
Park Service, visited the site while on an automobile tour of the new big parks
in the region. He foresaw Pipe Spring as
a future stop between Zion and the Grand Canyon on a National
Park-to-Park Highway as the automobile became more and more
prevalent and more and more visitors came to the region.
NPS has replicated the Castle's garden
The Mormon Church had divested itself of Pipe Spring in 1895
and the Park Service purchased its 40 acres from private owners in 1923 with funds
donated by Union Pacific Railroad, the Mormon Church, some private individuals
and Mather himself. The Park Service
has a very nice visitor center, a reconstructed garden and orchard, livestock
including cattle and chickens, and a short trail that leads above the site to a
scenic view of the castle and surrounding lands. Ironically all this development has had a
negative impact on the spring’s water flow.
Wells dug by NPS, the local Kanab Band of Paiute Indians and local
ranchers have reduced the flow from 50 gallons/minute to 5 gallons/minute. NPS hydrologists speculate the spring could
dry up within 10-20 years.
The 1923 presidential decree establishing Pipe Spring as a
“memorial of western pioneer life” has been expanded as the Park Service developed
the story here. It is a story not only of
pioneers, but also the original inhabitants and what happened when their
culture collides with the pioneer life.
And it’s the story of the Park Service bringing these valuable
perspectives to our attention. Should
you ever find yourself on Highway 89 in Kanab, Utah or on Highway 389 just
outside of Colorado City, Arizona, follow Stephen Mather’s vision, pull your
car over and spend some time at Pipe Spring.
