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the "impassable" region beyond is one of the remarkable pioneering achievements in the West. With some 80 wagons and over 1000 cattle, the Mormon party left Escalante late in 1879 planning to reach their destination in six weeks. It took them six months instead. They traveled 200 miles through a region where wagons had never been before and they built road most of the way, much of it worked in solid rock. The expedition crossed Glen Canyon just south of the Escalante River where a natural fault at the rim of the canyon was enlarged to accommodate wagons which were then driven to the river almost directly below. After crossing the Colorado on a ferry boat made for the purpose, it was necessary to get out of the canyon on the east side, to cross Grey Mesa (Wilson Mesa), to get through Clay Hill Pass and the dense wood at the head of Grand Gulch, and to surmount Comb Ridge. When, in April 1880, the colonists reached a place on the San Juan River which they called Bluff, they simply stopped from exhaustion. A somewhat easier (?) route across the Colorado at Halls Crossing (site 41) (Fig. 21) was opened by the Mormons next year. Bluff did not prosper. A good many of those who had not previously left moved to Verdure in 1887, and to Monticello the next year, and others left to settle the town of Blanding in 1905 when irrigation water was brought from the Abajo Mountains. Troubles with the Ute and Navajo Indians were to be expected as the white miners, cattlemen, and farmers encroached upon their lands. After the Meeker massacre at the White River agency in Colorado in 1879 the Utes were forced next year to relinquish their lands in Colorado, save for a small reservation set aside for the Southern Utes in southwestern Colorado, and they were removed to the Uintah basin in Utah. This did not end the hostilities. In 1880 two prospectors, James Merrick and Ernest Mitchell, were killed by some Navajos; the next year a number of whites were killed by Ute renegades at Pinhook in the La Sal Mountains; Navajos killed Amasa Barton in his trading post on the San Juan River in 1887; there were later troubles involving the southern Utes and with renegades who sought out the western slopes of the Abajo Mountains and Elk Ridge for the hideouts which the many canyons afforded. -13-Epson Perfection 4870 Photo, 400 dpi, 8 bit, 14,319,616 byte