Red Canyon Reminiscence

by Todd Guenther

Wildflowers © The Nature Conservancy

Most everyone is enthralled by the colorful panorama on the way to and from South Pass. Red Canyon's wide, sweeping southern slopes are brilliantly colored with springtime outbursts of yellow, purple and blue flowers. We linger over the sight of the canyon's red and orange bluffs stretching over green meadows and tall cottonwood trees during leisurely drives along the red dirt road that winds the length of the canyon floor.

For over ten thousand years, people have been drawn to Red Canyon for the same reason this place remains important to us today—the wealth and diversity of plants and animals that can be found there.  The earliest people to find shelter, sustenance and solace in Red Canyon were Folsom hunters ten millennia ago.  They are best remembered for courageously hunting mammoth and giant bison with spears, but what probably brought them to Red Canyon was its plant resources—the same variety and unique ecosystem that attracted the Conservancy just a decade ago.
 
From one camp, native people could harvest a multitude of edible and medicinal plants.  By walking a short distance to higher elevations, they could gather flora in different stages of development and thus postpone the labor of actually moving camp. This availability of game and plant foods brought their nomadic descendants back to Red Canyon for untold generations.  Spear and arrow points from every subsequent prehistoric period have been found at campsites and hunting areas in the canyon.

At some point, Red Canyon took on great religious significance.  Many cliff faces are decorated with faint petroglyphs—carvings in the stone—that held spiritual meaning for the people who made them hundreds and even thousands of years ago. 
 
Red Canyon was also an important transportation corridor.  Trails link the Wind River Basin to the Big Horn Basin and other points north.  Others lead east to the Sweetwater and the Great Plains – or west over South Pass to the Great Basin. The ruts gouged into the mountain side by thousands of travois poles drawn by horses and dogs can still be seen on the ridges northwest of where the county road climbs out of the bottom of the canyon. When whites first appeared in the area, they called this the Washakie Trail, commemorating the journeys Washakie and the Shoshones made through the canyon several times each year.

Because of the area’s importance as a place to find food, its religious significance, and its value to travelers, tribes fought fierce battles trying to prevent early white settlers from establishing homesteads in the canyon. Life there was dangerous into the middle 1870s, when ultimately the Indians were defeated and driven from the area. After that time, the density of the canyon’s white population greatly increased. Ranches, stage-stop stations, a post office, a store, and a resident physician’s office dotted the valley floor.  Extensive fields of potatoes, grains, and fruit trees flourished on the bottomlands and provided food for the miners at South Pass.

Agriculture would have ended with entrepreneurs’ plans to bring water from high in the Winds to wash the canyon clean of all soil—and gold—with a massive hydraulic mining scheme early in the 1900s.  Instead, drought and economic factors after World War I drove both the mining entrepreneurs and the homesteaders out of business. The few remaining ranchers consolidated their holdings into larger operations.  After World War II, the new highway was built above the canyon and only local traffic used the old road along its bottom. The plummeting human population allowed wildlife to return in large numbers.  Today, the canyon supports great herds of grazing animals, much as it has for thousands of years.

Todd Guenther holds degrees in Archaeology and American Studies and is Director of the Fremont County Pioneer Museum.  He and his family live on an historic ranch near Red Canyon.