Utah in the Twentieth Century

2 “The Famous Blue Valley” and a Century of Hopes

45 2 “The Famous Blue Valley” and a Century of Hopes Kristen Rogers-Iversen Historians of nineteenth-century Utah frequently focus on the successful ranching and farming established by Mormon settlers. Historians of the twentieth century often describe mining, railroading, urban growth, and natural wonders. Kristen Rogers-Iversen looks beyond these success stories to tell the tale of a not-so-successful place in southern Utah. Blue Valley is a place that seemed so barren that Native Americans did not live there. Newcomers to Utah looked for open spaces in the late-nineteenth and especially the twentieth century. They believed promotional material and struggled to survive in an arid area. That attempt still continues in the twenty-first century as the few remaining residents of Blue Valley toil to remain or attempt to sell out. Rogers-Iversen masterfully interweaves her personal experiences with the residents’ historical and contemporary stories. She draws on scholarly research by historians, archaeologists, environmentalists, and public-land policy makers and smoothly blends in her personal narratives and interviews. Her journalist/personal-essay style creates a delightful read about a place rarely written about in Utah history but one that is not all that unique. The first time I remember seeing Blue Valley was in 1972. I was a college student and had just emerged from an astonishing backpack into the Maze section of Canyonlands, a paradise of creek and sandstone. Our group decided to spend the next night among the sandstone walls and apple blossoms of Capitol Reef. On the way there, we drove through Blue Valley, several miles or so of land along the Fremont River west of Hanksville, Utah. It was without question the ugliest expanse of land I could ever imagine— only good “for holding the earth together,” as people sometimes say about the 46 Kristen Rogers-Iversen arid West. Shining pale in the hot sun, the valley seemed only slightly less sterile than the moon. Stark mesas and dreary gray humps of Mancos shale lined the valley. In the few places with any vegetation, tamarisk and greasewood had taken over. A few cottonwoods clung to the sand along the river. A ruined stone building and a scattering of falling-down log structures implied that, incredibly, people had actually lived here once. But how could anyone have ever thought he or she could survive in this desert? Thirty years later, this place has become beautiful to me—on its own terms, and also because of the stories it holds. It started when I met, on paper, some of those people who had the temerity to think they could survive—and, in fact, build Zion—in Blue Valley. Niels J. and Minnie Nielsen came with their children to the valley in 1898. Later, the Nielsen boys wrote about Blue Valley and its people, and when I got a taste of those people’s lives—how they lived by faith, gossiped, got sick, buried loved ones, built dams, danced, weeded, got stuck in quicksand, swatted millions of mosquitoes and killed snakes in their houses, drove schoolteachers crazy, fistfought , made adobes, planted fruit trees, prayed—I could not rest until I got back to see the place—to see it again, with new eyes. Through their eyes. And through my own, standing a century apart from them. The year is 2004. The ghost town of Giles—if you can call this lonesome stretch of ground a ghost town—lies on the gray clay flats south of the Remains of a roadhouse in Giles built by the Edward Abbott family. The photograph was taken in 1941. Used by permission of the Utah State Historical Society. All rights reserved 47 “The Famous Blue Valley” and a Century of Hopes perennially coffee-colored Fremont River. To get there, you must cross the river—maybe on foot, because if the Fremont has been flooding, the river crossing will be a morass of “gumbo” mud for several yards before you can even get to the riverbank. Step in that mud, and you may sink to your thigh. So you must set out south from the rock ruin that was once the Abbott family’s way station/hotel. You must cross land barren except for Russian thistle and a few other desiccated plants, then shoulder through thick tamarisk and slog through gumbo till the clay on your shoes adds a few inches to your height. Then you climb/slide down a steep bank to the river, roll up your pants, and work...