Title: The Geologic Story of Colorado National Monument
Author: Stanley William Lohman
Illustrator: John R. Stacy
Release date: June 14, 2016 [eBook #52325]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Dave Morgan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
BALANCED ROCK, near head of Fruita Canyon. Spire and rock are Wingate Sandstone resting on red Chinle Formation; thin caprock is protective layer of resistant Kayenta Formation. (Frontispiece)
By S. W. Lohman
GEOLOGICAL SURVEY BULLETIN 1508
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
JAMES G. WATT, Secretary
GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
Doyle G. Frederick, Acting Director
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Washington, D.C. 20402
From 1946 until about 1956 I carried out fieldwork intermittently on the geology and artesian water supply of the Grand Junction area, Colorado, the results of which have been published.[1] The area mapped geologically contains about 332 square miles in the west-central part of Mesa County and includes all of Colorado National Monument. During the fieldwork several successive custodians or superintendents and several park naturalists urged that upon completion of my professional paper I prepare a brief account of the geology of the Monument in terms understandable by laymen, and which could be sold at the Visitor Center. This I was happy to do and there resulted “The geologic story of Colorado National Monument,”[2] published by the Colorado and Black Canyon Natural History Association in cooperation with the National Park Service. This report contained colored sketches by John R. Stacy and a colored cover, but the photographs and many of the drawings were reproduced in black and white.
Later, after I had prepared popular style reports containing mostly color photographs on Canyonlands[3] and Arches[4] National Parks, officials of Colorado National Monument and I discussed the possibility of preparing a revised and enlarged edition of my 1965 report containing mainly color photographs, inasmuch as the supply of the black and white edition was nearing exhaustion, and later became out of print. At the meeting in the Monument on June 8, 1976, attended by Robert (Bob) E. Benton, Superintendent, A. J. (Jerry) Banta, Supervising Park Ranger, Margaret Short, Park Naturalist and Secretary of the Natural History Association, and me, it was agreed that: (1) A revised and enlarged edition containing mostly color photographs should be prepared for publication as a bulletin of the U.S. Geological Survey, and (2) that the Colorado and Black Canyon Natural History Association gave its permission for use of any or all of the copyrighted material in the first edition. The present report resulted.
The cover is a duotone of a 9- × 12-cm infrared photograph of Independence Monument taken by me. (See also fig. 6.) Most of the color photographs were taken by me on 4- × 5-inch or 9- × 12-cm tripod mounted cameras using lenses of several focal lengths, but I took some with 35-mm cameras. Some of the color photographs and all the black and white ones were taken by those credited in the captions, to whom grateful acknowledgment is made. The points from which most of the photographs were taken are shown in figure 26.
West side of Otto’s Monument
The story of how Colorado National Monument came into being is as colorful as the canyons and cliffs themselves. The fantastic canyon country had a magical attraction for John Otto[5] (fig. 1) who, in 1906, camped near the northeastern mouth of Monument Canyon and began building trails into the canyons and onto the mesas—the high tablelands that separate the deep canyons. He did this back-breaking work simply because he wanted to and so that others could share the beauty of this wild country.
In 1907 Otto got the Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce to petition Secretary of the Interior James A. Garfield to set aside the area as a National Monument. Otto’s dream came true on May 24, 1911, when President William Howard Taft signed the proclamation creating the Monument. On June 14, Otto climbed to the top of Independence Monument (fig. 6) where he placed the Stars and Stripes to celebrate Flag Day. For several years thereafter Otto placed the flag atop Independence Monument on July 4th to celebrate Independence Day.
Until about 1921 the only routes into the Monument proper were John Otto’s trails, but in that year the ranchers of Glade Park joined with Otto in building the steep, twisting Serpents Trail from No Thoroughfare Canyon to the mesa above—a much shorter route to Grand Junction. It had 54 switchbacks and climbed about 1,500 feet in 2½ miles. The Serpents Trail was included in the Monument in 1933 and was used until 1950 when an easier route was built up the west side of No Thoroughfare Canyon and through a tunnel to the top of the mesa (figs. 3, 56). The Serpents Trail has been preserved as an interesting foot trail (fig. 55), which can be hiked downhill in an hour or so. A parking area near the foot of the trail allows one member of a group to drive ahead to await the others.
JOHN OTTO, fantastic father of Colorado National Monument, and his helpers. Photograph courtesy Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce. (Fig. 1)
In 1924 John Otto got the idea that the Monument should include a herd of big game, so he talked the Colorado Game and Fish Department into shipping six young elk, and he got the local Elks Lodge to pay the transportation costs. The elk were turned loose in Monument Canyon, but they found the sparse vegetation and scant water supply ill suited to their needs, so after a few years they found a way out over the rim and migrated about 20 miles south of the Monument to lush high country where they joined with native elk and multiplied to become the ancestors of the present fine herd on Piñon Mesa (shown in fig. 34D). Occasionally a few return to the Monument and may be seen mainly in Ute Canyon. Native mule deer are frequently seen in and near the Monument.
Far from being discouraged, Otto then hatched the idea to start a buffalo[6] herd to be purchased by donations of buffalo nickels from school children and by contributions from the Odd Fellows and others. He finally raised enough money to get the patient Game and Fish Department to send him two cows and one bull. Unfortunately the bull died, so Otto talked the National Park Service into shipping him a bull from Yellowstone National Park. This time success crowned his efforts, and the small herd eventually multiplied to as many as 45 animals, but generally the herd has been kept at about 20-25 head ever since. You may spot some of them when you gaze down into Monument or Ute Canyons or when you drive past the northeastern boundary. Rarely, you may spot one in Red Canyon.
At the northeast corner of Fourth Street and Ute Avenue in Grand Junction is a most unusual object, which illustrates yet another peculiarity of John Otto—fantastic father of Colorado National Monument (fig. 2). Its history is best told by quoting from Al Look,[7] though its purpose still remains a mystery.
One day a horse drawn dray backed up to a vacant lot on Grand Junction’s Main Street [corner 6th] and unloaded a granite cube four feet square, carved on two sides. It weighed more than a ton and Otto supervised the setting.
One side [now facing west and not visible in fig. 2] showed a three foot circle containing a swastika with a five pointed star in each quarter. Above the emblem was carved “Rock of Ages” and below read “Cross of Ages.” The second side [now facing south, and shown in fig. 2] was beyond normal comprehension. Two large W’s on either side of a small swastika were over the letters or initials P.P., then four chain links with the letters T, H, L, J. inscribed, followed by the initials I.E. Below on the left was “1918,” over “Year 1”. On the right was “Old Count” and under it “New Count.” Between them stands the word ‘MARCH.’ Below this are abbreviations for the seven days of the week with the figure 1 under MON ending with a 6 under SAT. The bottom line [most of which is barely visible in the photograph] contained the figure 7 in a circle, a carpenter’s square, a small rectangle, probably representing a level, a plumb bob, a carpenter’s compass and a circle showing the western hemisphere. That is all. It made sense to John Otto because from somewhere he gathered considerable money to have this monument carved by the local gravestone merchant. It stood for several years to mystify pedestrians, and was finally moved beside the Redlands road to the [east entrance of] Colorado Monument where it is now hidden by weeds.[8]
It was still there in the 50’s when my family and I were startled to find it. We were afraid it might be lost forever so are glad it finally found a safe resting place on a concrete slab at the museum. I shall greatly appreciate hearing from any reader who can decipher this enigma.
JOHN OTTO’S MONUMENT, at southwest corner of the Historical Museum and Institute of Western Colorado, at northeast corner of Fourth Street and Ute Avenue, Grand Junction. View looking north. Face is 4 feet square. (Fig. 2)
Otto’s rock is at the southwest corner of The Historical Museum and Institute of Western Colorado. The main attraction inside is a life-size skeleton of Allosaurus (fig. 23), whose bones are exact plastic replicas of real ones at the museum of Brigham Young University, at Provo, Utah. The painstaking casting of the “bones” and assembly of the self-supporting skeleton was done by Al T. Look, son of author Al Look listed under “References.” The museum also houses other items of interest from the Grand Junction area.
Construction of the scenic Rim Rock Drive through the Monument was begun by the National Park Service about 1931 using workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the drive eventually was completed to join roads from Fruita and Grand Junction. The route from Fruita includes a winding road up Fruita Canyon and through two tunnels to the mesa (figs. 3, 44, 45).
A modern Visitor Center, new housing facilities for park personnel, additions to the campgrounds, the Devils Kitchen Picnic Area near the East Entrance, several self-guiding nature trails, and additional overlooks and roadside exhibits were completed in 1964 as part of the Mission 66 program of the National Park Service.
The Monument originally included 13,749 acres, but boundary changes in 1933 and 1939 increased the total to 17,660 acres, and the inclusion of all of No Thoroughfare Canyon and other boundary adjustments in 1978 increased the size to about 20,457 acres, or about 32 square miles (see map, fig. 3).
John Otto, early explorers, and even the Ute Indians who once hunted in the area were by no means the first people to view the Monument, in fact they were “Johnnies-come-lately.” Considerable evidence indicates that prehistoric people inhabited the area thousands of years ago.
MAP OF COLORADO NATIONAL MONUMENT, showing location in
Colorado, boundaries, streams, highways and roads, principal trails, named
features, overlooks, and—in triangles—trip guides localities. The trip guides
numbers correspond to the numbers in the right margins of the section entitled
“Trips through and around the Monument.” Visitors are given pamphlets at the
two entrance stations and may purchase other reports and maps at the Visitor
Center. (Fig. 3)
High-resolution Map
Many years ago Al Look, of Grand Junction, discovered and excavated two caves in the part of No Thoroughfare Canyon formerly outside the Monument. He found stone projectile points, knives, awls, milling stones, parts of a sandal and coiled basket, reed matting, corn, corncobs, acorns, and animal bones, but no pottery—indicating that the people had not progressed beyond basket making. Similar artifacts were found in several other nearby places on the Uncompahgre Plateau. Archaeologists have named this old culture the Uncompahgre Complex, and date it back to a few thousand years before the time of Christ.[9] It should be pointed out that it is unlawful to remove artifacts, fossils, rocks, or minerals from a National Park or Monument.
In the summer of 1963 an archaeological survey of Colorado National Monument was carried out, under the terms of an agreement between the National Park Service and the University of Colorado, by Stroh and Ewing and their field assistants.[10] A total of 75 aboriginal sites were found of which 71 were within the Monument boundaries of that date, and 4 were closely adjacent. These comprised 41 open campsites, 24 rock shelters, 2 small caves, and 8 chipping stations. Artifacts recovered included 62 projectile points, 21 metates (grinding stones), 40 manos (hand stones), 111 whole or fragments of blades or scrapers, 6 choppers, several fragments of baskets, potsherds (bits of broken pottery) at two sites, 2 wood awls, several strands of yucca fibers, 3 corncobs, 6 kernels of corn, several bone fragments, storage cists at five sites, and petroglyphs at three locations.
Stroh and Ewing concluded that the majority of the sites appear to have been the campsites of a hunting and gathering people, and they speculated that there may have been aboriginal activity in the area from as long as several thousand years ago to relatively recent times.
The largest of the petroglyphs,[11] or rock drawings, are on a fallen slab of Wingate Sandstone in No Thoroughfare Canyon, and are shown in figure 4. Archaeologist John Crouch (footnote 10), who kindly reexamined these petroglyphs in February 1980, told me that most of the figures appear to be Shoshonian (Ute), but that some may be of the Fremont culture[12] or even older.
PETROGLYPHS, on fallen slab of Wingate Sandstone in No Thoroughfare Canyon. Figure of man at lower right is about 6 inches high. The fading designs were traced with chalk before photographing them. Photograph by T. R. Giles, U.S. Geological Survey. (Fig. 4)
Prior to 1881 the Monument area was inhabited only by Ute Indians, but it was visited from time to time by a few fur trappers, explorers, and geologists. In 1776 an expedition led by Fathers Dominguez and Escalante passed northward across Grand Mesa, the high plateau just east of the area, which is pointed out in many of the photographs. A trading post was built by Joseph Roubidoux about 1838 just above the present site of Grand Junction. In 1853 Captain John W. Gunnison, seeking a new route for a transcontinental railroad, led an exploring party down what is now the Gunnison River Valley, past the confluence with the Grand River (now called the Colorado, p. 16), and on down the valley. Geologists and topographers of the Hayden Survey found only Ute Indians in the area in 1875 and 1876, and their field season of 1875 was abruptly cut short because of skirmishes with hostile Utes. After the Meeker (Colorado) Massacre of 1879, believed by many to have been caused mainly by the ignorance and shortsightedness of Meeker himself, treaties were signed forcing the Utes out of western Colorado onto reservations in eastern Utah, and the last of the Utes was reportedly out of the area by September 1881. The Grand Valley was immediately opened to settlement, and the first ranch was staked out on September 7, 1881. Nineteen days later George A. Crawford founded Grand Junction as a townsite and formed the Grand Junction Town Company the next month. The success of the new town was assured on November 21, 1882, when the narrow-gage line of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad (now Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad) reached it via the Gunnison River valley. The town of Fruita was founded by William E. Pabor in 1883 and incorporated the following year.
Of the many early expeditions down the Colorado River, only one went past what is now Colorado National Monument—the ill-fated Brown-Stanton expedition. After the pioneering expeditions of 1869 and 1871 down the Green and Colorado Rivers by Major John Wesley Powell and his men, the many ensuing river expeditions started in Utah or Wyoming; but the first phase of the Brown-Stanton expedition started in Colorado—at Grand Junction. In 1889 Frank M. Brown organized a company for the construction of the proposed Denver, Colorado Canyon, and Pacific Railway, which was to carry coal from mines in Colorado over a “water-level” line through the mighty canyons of the Colorado River to the Gulf of California some 1,200 miles away, from which coal would be shipped to various ports in California. On March 26, 1889, president Brown, chief engineer F. C. Kendricks, and assistant engineer T. P. Rigney drove the first stake at Grand Junction for a survey of the new line. Then Brown left for the East to obtain financing, and the other two men plus some hired hands took off in a boat down the Grand River. After reaching the confluence, they towed the boat up the Green River to the town of Green River, Utah, thus becoming the first to make this trip upstream, albeit on foot and dragging their boats. Brown, who had returned from the East, his newly appointed chief engineer Robert Brewster Stanton, and 14 others in six ill-designed boats of cedar rather than oak, left Green River, Utah, on May 25, 1889. Against the advice of Major Powell and others, they carried no life preservers. After many mishaps, Brown and two others were drowned near the head of Marble Canyon, and the ill-fated expedition temporarily ground to a halt. However, the indefatigable Stanton had new boats built of oak, and with a reorganized party of 12 left the mouth of the Dirty Devil River on November 25. After many additional mishaps the party finally reached the Gulf of California on April 26, 1890. In spite of Stanton’s heroic efforts, the railroad was never built, and the Grand Canyon was spared the huffing and puffing of locomotives.
As shown in figures 3, 8, and 26, the first major canyon west of the West Entrance of the monument is called Kodels Canyon (pronounced \‘kōdǝls\). It was named after an early-day stonemason turned prospector, a hermit, who came to the Fruita area before 1900 and prospected for gold until at least 1930 in the canyon that now bears his name. He seemingly built a cabin or house near the mouth of the canyon, spent most of the rest of his life in a vain quest for gold in the canyon, barricaded his house against would-be intruders, and took potshots at anyone approaching his home for fear they were after his “gold.” Some thought him only half crazy, but when he took repeated shots at an Indian named Henry Kadig, he was adjudged wholly insane and sent to the mental hospital at Pueblo, Colorado, for several years. When he got out he sold the grazing rights in his canyon to the late Irving Beard of Fruita, and seemingly was not heard from again. According to various estimates, Kodel dug an adit between 18 and 150 feet into the dark Proterozoic rock in the side of the canyon (shown in fig. 3), then sunk a shaft somewhere between 30 and 50 feet deep. He was always “on the verge of a big strike,” but there is no record of any actual production.
Later, a prospector from the midwest spent several summers digging in Devils Canyon, the next major canyon to the west, but he was equally unsuccessful. The unsuccessful attempts of Kodel and others is not surprising, for the two canyons are some 100 miles north of the Colorado mineral belt—a band extending roughly from Boulder to the western part of the San Juan Mountains, in which ore-bearing Upper Cretaceous or lower Tertiary rocks were intruded into all overlying rocks of whatever age.
About 3 miles west of the Glade Park Store and Post Office are three large caves in a cliff of the Wingate Sandstone on the north wall of a canyon containing a tributary of Clark’s Wash. The middle cave, which formerly contained a small one-room framehouse and other improvements, was occupied for about 40 years prior to 1958 by Mrs. Laura Hazel Miller (fig. 5). A large cave just to the west (left) was used for storage, and another large cave just to the east formerly was fenced to shelter domestic animals. Mrs. Miller lived alone most of this time but had a dog for companionship the last few years she lived in the cave. When my wife and I visited her in the mid-fifties we had a very pleasant conversation with this very intelligent woman and could hardly believe she was 87 years old. She could not understand why anyone could live in crowded cities as she much preferred the peace and quiet of her cave. Once a week she walked the 6 miles round trip to and from the Glade Park Store and Post Office, bought what few necessities she needed, and telephoned her daughter in Grand Junction. Maybe she had something the rest of us have missed! She became sick in her nineties and moved to Grand Junction to live with her daughter. After she died, the property was sold, and I have since observed that vandals had burned her one room house and had destroyed most of the other improvements.