'Mapping the Four Corners' Gives us First Glimpse of Utah's Wild Country

Only six words: “We named the stream Recapture Creek.”

But it was enough to make long-time history professor Robert McPherson let out a holler of “Eureka!”

“It was like,” he recalls, “‘yeah! This is so cool!’”

That’s because uncovering the source of this particular and strange southeastern Utah place name has been a goal for the professor since he sat down in 1995 to write the history of Blanding.

His research uncovered plenty of “far-fetched” theories, he said, one involving an Aztec princess, another of Montezuma’s legendary buried gold.

Then he found it — in Wyoming of all places — an actual eyewitness account hidden in the field notes of a surveyor who traveled through the area in 1875. The Recapture Canyon story begins with a nighttime disappearance of a herd of mules. The discovery by Tom, a mule hand, of two Navajo men pulling the animals into the brush. Then, a flash of lightening that revealed the three horror-struck men glaring at each other.

Tom’s “hair stood on end; his flesh crept,” the writer continues. “… He was utterly defenseless.”

But resourceful Tom jumped on the nearest horse and took off after the fleeing Indians, yelping all the while. “The redskins, as they flew down the valley, must have felt their blood curdle at the terrible sounds,” wrote William Henry Holmes.

Later, when the renowned scientist and explorer sat down to his field journal at day’s end, he named the canyon after the spectacular recapture of Old Baldy and the other mules.

The story is among the adventures recorded in a new book that follows a team of surveyors through the crags, canyons and crumbling cliff dwellings of southeastern Utah. Mapping the Four Corners: Narrating the Hayden Survey of 1875 (University of Oklahoma Press) is by professor Robert McPherson and associate professor Susan Rhoades Neel. Both are history faculty at Utah State University Eastern — McPherson in Blanding and Neel in Price.

The book is indeed, as its name states, a narrative by the men who conducted the massive survey that sought to square-peg this wild, dramatic and ancient landscape into the squares, triangles and contours of a modern map.

Researching newspaper stories, field notes and journals, the historians discovered descriptions and travel logs filled with vibrant modern-sounding language and vivid details. The historians decided to let the adventurers speak for themselves. The result is a headlong rush that pulls readers along in their journey, much like a novel.

Indeed, says Neel, “That’s what we were going for.” She laughs, adding, “It’s a damn good story.”

“You get such an immediate sense of how these men, most of whom were educated easterners, reacted to a place in 1875 that was about as middle of nowhere as you could get in America,” she said.

One reviewer, echoing that sense of immediacy and inclusion, wrote, “I felt at times as if I were privy to the email accounts of the Hayden Survey members.”

The geographical survey entered popular culture in 1871 when organizer and geologist Ferdinand Hayden began the famous trek through Yellowstone that resulted in the iconic photos and oil landscapes we know even today. The surveyors moved on to Colorado, and in 1875 the last group — sans Hayden — set out for Four Corners, an area that had been identified but marked only by a rock cairn.

The extensive field notes and survey maps were devised to be, as the book explains, “a tool for orderly economic develop of the West.” It was to lead settlers to fertile valleys and miners to coal veins. At the same time, lively day-to-day newspaper reports printed in eastern cities left readers breathless by the surveyors’ encounters with bareback-riding native warriors.

Educated in eastern U.S. universities and embracing the era’s sense of wonder at the natural world, the young scientists gawked at everything, because everything was strange to them.

As Neel points out, the Hayden surveyors were “right on the edge of the collision between ancient and modern people.”

“They were among the first Europeans to see and encounter the amazing prehistory of the region,” she said.

At what is now Mesa Verde National Park, the group came across “rude attempts at drawing or picture-making” on the rock walls. “These specimens did not give us a very high opinion of the artistic talent of the cliff men,” surveyor Charles Aldrich wrote about the petroglyphs that are so valued today.

Photographs by expedition member William Henry Jackson reveal the first images of the ruins at Hovenweep National Monument and Mesa Verde. His images of both man and mountain provide what McPherson calls a “visual backup” to the text — but at a cost. The famous photographer toiled under the burden of a big box camera, large glass negatives, chemicals and a portable darkroom.

More than ancient structures, however, they encountered the local denizens — mostly the warlike Utes and a number of Navajo, Hopi and Apaches.

“Everywhere they turned, they ended up running into Utes and Paiutes,” said McPherson.

The continuing conflict erupted with a running gunfight in what is now Dry Valley that left three Indians dead. The surveyors escaped only after ditching their equipment and scrambling up a hidden deer path. This story of “how the Indians drove the government scientists out” remains in local folklore, said Neel.

Still, the native population understood that these scientists were harbingers.  Pioneers would establish nearby Monticello a decade later, the small outpost of Bluff in 1880. Uranium prospectors were close on their heels.

McPherson is renowned for his knowledge of the traditional and complicated Native American culture that first drew him to Blanding in 1976. Following a prolific career that produced more than a dozen scholarly books on indigenous peoples, McPherson says he’ll retire this spring.

“I’ll be 70 next July,” he laughs. “But don’t put the nail in my coffin yet. I’ve got a bit of life left in me.”

Indeed, readers will soon see Fighting in Canyon Country: Native American Conflict 500 AD to the 1920s, and his research on trading posts, Both Sides of the Bullpen, will be published by the UO press.

McPherson anticipates this “slice of the late 19th century” will be read by scholars of Native Americans and the Four Corners. But it’s a book with general appeal as well. While the interpretations of these “pre-anthropologists” may seem skewed from today’s perspective, “they were just spot on in terms of what they observed and recorded,” said McPherson. “You can take their drawings and go right to the site and see the exact same thing they did.”

Mapping the Four Corners is volume 83 in the OU Press’ American Exploration and Travel Series. More information on the book can be found online.

Related links

Utah State University Eastern-Blanding

Utah State University Eastern-Price

USU College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Writer and contact: Janelle Hyatt, 435-797-0289, Janelle.hyatt@usu.edu