The co-op’s clientele changed somewhat, but its role remained intact as the town’s pioneer residents dwindled away to just nine of the first families.Bishop Jens Nielson’s great-granddaughter Corinne Nielson Roring began to fulfill a lifelong dream of her father’s (Floyd Nielson), which was to rebuild the old fort where he was raised. Skillfully interweaving historical figures and events with fictional characters, bestselling author Gerald Lund tells the true story of the Hole-in-the-Rock pioneers. When we was walking down Willie looked back and cried and asked me how we would get back home.”A total of 236 individuals from sixteen different southwestern Utah villages formed the mission. The pathway at Hole in the Rock is still cleared out, and you get to hike through the path that these enduring people traveled, bringing wagons down with all of their stuff and their oxen. Ahead of the pioneers, to the east, lay nearly two hundred miles of rough terrain with no road and little water. An influx of white men — cattlemen looking for grazing land, miners … Unfortunately, snow had already blocked any return to their former homes, and so the group determined to forge ahead.In 1879 when a group of Mormon pioneers began the now famous Hole-in-the-Rock expedition, the San Juan region of southeastern Utah was one of the most isolated parts of the United States. A few years later, Karl and LaRue Barton purchased the rock home in Bluff built by her great-grandfather Jens Nielson.Necessity required them to establish means of feeding their families. Decker described it as “…the roughest country you or anybody else ever seen; its nothing in the world but rocks and holes, hills and hollows. The scouts had discovered the Hole-in-the Rock, a narrow slit in the west wall of Glen Canyon.
The San Juan River frequently washed out their The 55.5-mile long Hole-in-the-Rock Road begins on Highway 12, just southeast of the town of Escalante, and ends at the edge of a cliff overlooking Lake Powell’s Register Rock and Cottonwood Canyon. Click … Based upon this recommendation the group began to gather in late November and early December at Forty Mile Spring about forty miles southeast of Escalante. According to Charles Redd whose father, Lemuel H. Redd, Jr., drove a horse team up the hill, the steep, slick grade took its toll on the exhausted animals and men. Mormon pioneers descend the hole they had blasted into the rock. They formed a base camp at Fifty Mile Spring, about six miles from the Hole-in-the-Rock. July 1, 2019.
Calf Canyon was used as a natural corral during the early years of settlement. A rock church replaced the log meetinghouse. “Hole in-the-Rock Pioneers” is a name that originated from the pioneer group that met the harrowing challenge of a narrow crevice in a rock ravine that sent them down a 45-degree plunge over 2,000 feet to the Colorado River. Photo by Kay Shumway.The rebuilt Bluff Co-op store and Bluff Fort Visitors’ Center welcomes thousands of visitors each year. They cut a wagon passage through two hundred miles of that inhospitable corner of the state and ultimately succeeded in establishing permanent communities in its remote expanses.dams and ditches, and Indian hostilities posed a continual threat. The first wagon I saw go down they put the brake on and rough locked the hind wheels and had a big rope fastened to the wagon and about ten men holding back on it and then they went down like they would smash everything.
After much more work, the majority of the “square” was acquired, a visitors’ center was opened, and plans were made for reconstruction of the co-op store. Local freighting and revenue from the store provided a way for the people to stay in San Juan long enough to make a start in the cattle business, which became their salvation.Although their trek to the San Juan River was supposed to take six weeks, their arduous journey to the southeastern corner of Utah took six months.