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Human History People have visited what is now Canyonlands National Park for over 10,000 years. Over time, various groups moved in and out of the area in concert with the availability of natural resources and the technology for exploiting those resources. Hunter Gatherers
Ancestral Puebloans By A.D. 250, farming techniques from Mesoamerica had reached the southwest, and the hunter-gatherers were cultivating corn and constructing slab-lined cists for storing the collected grains. Intially, the agriculturalists did not have much use for the hot, dry climate of Canyonlands. However, growing populations in nearby Mesa Verde and new techniques of floodwater farming caused people to take advantage of bottomlands and alluvial banks in many canyons of the southwest. By A.D. 1200, there was a major occupation in Salt Creek Canyon in the Needles District. You can see the storage structures or granaries used by the ancestral puebloans in the Needles District at Roadside Ruin, and at the Island in the Sky on Aztec Butte. Around A.D. 1300, the Ancestral Puebloans left the region and moved south to Arizona and New Mexico, probably due to climatic changes. Utes, Navajos and Paiutes Utes moved into the area as early as A.D. 1300, living without permanent dwellings much like the hunter-gatherers in the Archaic period. Ute, Navajo and Paiute Indians all occupied southern Utah when Spanish explorers entered the area in the late 1700's, though their use of the Canyonlands area appears to have been minimal. Exploration
River Mapping Europeans knew little of the Colorado River and its tributaries until 1869, when Major John Wesley Powell completed his first expedition from Green River, Utah, through the Grand Canyon. Powell repeated the expedition in 1871-72, continuing his studies of the geological, natural and cultural history of the area. Bert Loper, Charles S. Russell, and E.R. Monett made the first pleasure run down the Colorado River through Cataract Canyon in 1907. Julius Stone was the first to hire a guide, Nathaniel Galloway, to take him down the river in 1909. The first motion pictures of the canyons were filmed by Emery and Ellsworth Kolb on their 1911 trip, and in 1937 Norman Nevills started commercial river trips down the Colorado.
Settlement In March 1883, the Denver & Rio Grande railroad joined with the Rio Grande Western railroad near Green River, Utah, providing rail transportation to southeastern Utah. This, combined with the removal of Native Americans to reservations during the late 1800's and early 1900's, nurtured the growth of farming and ranching communities such as Moab and Bluff. With the Utes removed to the Uinta Reservation, Mormon settlers reclaimed the abandoned pioneer community of Moab, and Mormons from the town of Bluff settled Blanding, Monticello, and La Sal. Ranching
The Biddlecomes, Ekkers, Tidwells and Chaffins are names common to the Maze, and A.C. Ekker continues to ranch inside the Orange Cliffs Unit of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area today. In addition to cattle, the rugged country around Canyonlands harbored cattle rustlers and other outlaws. Robbers Roost, a mesa top west of the Maze, served as a secluded refuge for Robert Leroy Parker (Butch Cassidy), Tom and Bill McCarthy, Matt Warner and others. Mining Due to the rugged topography of the Canyonlands area, much of it was accessible only by foot or horse until the uranium boom of the 1950's. With the growth of the country's nuclear arms program, the Atomic Energy Commission offered monetary incentives for the discovery and delivery of uranium ore. Certain rock layers in Canyonlands contain uranium, and prospectors built many exploratory roads on public lands in search of "radioactive gold." Many of these routes, including the White Rim Road at the Island in the Sky, are popular four-wheel-drive roads today; others exist as scars that are slowly revegetating.
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