So I get this email from Stiles telling me that he thinks it’s a good idea that my next dispatch should be about, “how you ‘two kids’ met”. I swear I’m not making this up. He evidently forgot that the…
We took mules, all of us, as we expected the very roughest kind of trailless work; and we got it…. Wetherill said, while we were in an oak thicket on a very sharp slope at the foot of a canyon,…
The fire was now burning brightly. We sat down around Grandfather as the firelight played over his face and white hair. We could hear the wind blowing outside, but everything was peaceful inside the hogan and we were all contented.…
The recent controversies swirling around Bears Ears National Monument are only the latest in a series of struggles resulting from attempts to increase federal government involvement with exceptional places in the Utah/Arizona borderlands region of the Colorado Plateau. Elmo R.…
“When I was a young boy, about six years old, my grandfather and mother started me on the path of light.” —Wolfkiller Found among the papers of my great-grandmother, Louisa Wade Wetherill, was a remarkable story of early Navajo life…
Zane Grey’s inspiration for much of the geography in his 1915 novel, The Rainbow Trail, was the real trail that he followed on his adventurous 1913 horseback excursion to the magnificent Rainbow Natural Bridge. He recounted the experience in his…
Sometimes the Barbarian seems to be the Civilized Man. Sometimes the Civilized Man seems to be the Barbarian. —Benson J. Lossing, 1870 In late October, 1907, my great grandfather, John Wetherill, was making his way up the San Juan…
Note: Yesterday, the Deseret News ran a shorter version of this summary. This 1400 word essay provides a more detailed analysis of the Monument debate, which is sure to continue after yesterday’s announcement by President Trump that the Monument will…