History
There is some evidence that American fur trappers may have entered the canyon in the early 19th century, but the first unequivocal sign of a white presence is an inscription on the canyon wall reading "S. Groesbeck August 19, 1867". John Wesley Powell's second Colorado River expedition camped at the mouth of the canyon in 1871, and the earliest appearance of the name Nine Mile Canyon is in records of the expedition.
Nine Mile Road was constructed through the canyon in 1886 by the Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th Cavalry Regiment, linking Fort Duchesne to the railroad through the city of Price. Use of the road surged in 1889 after the discovery of Gilsonite in the Uinta Basin. This was the main transportation route in eastern Utah until well into the 20th century. Most of the stagecoach, mail, freight, and telegraph traffic into the Uinta Basin passed through Nine Mile until after the arrival of the Uintah Railway around 1905.
The freight trade led to the settlement of the canyon itself. One of the main stagecoach stops developed into a town of sorts. Called Harper, it included a hotel, store, school, and an unofficial post office. It lacked a formal town site, simply taking in a long stretch of scattered ranches and buildings. The community grew gradually from the 1880s until it was officially established as the town of Harper in 1905. The Harper precinct as a whole had a population of 130 at its peak in 1910, but in the early 1920s Harper became a ghost town.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)