As a practiced old-timer, I read with interest the tales Richard Negri extracted from seven men and three women by means of a tape-recorder—oral history, the process is sometimes called. Since a good deal of the significance of the tales depends on their stern setting, I’ll risk condensing some of what Negri has already said about the backdrop. The reason will become apparent as we thread our way through the rock jungles on both sides of Canyonlands National Park. If you enter Negri’s territory, as I’ll call it, in an automobile, you’ll soon find yourself immersed in a broad...

Raising cattle or sheep is not an easy life. Even on the fairway-like pastures found in parts of Texas or Wyoming where the land is normally blessed with ample rainfall, riding a horse ten or twelve hours a day or being afoot in the dust behind a flock of sheep takes a special breed of person. To raise stock in eastern Wayne, Emery, or Garfield counties in southeastern Utah demanded an extra degree of determination on the part of those hardy women and men who operated isolated ranches and scratched out a living on the San Rafael Desert and in...

This is my story of the Chaffin family and its role in the early history of the land that is now a part of the west side of Canyonlands National Park (the Maze District and the detached Horseshoe Canyon Unit), the north and east part of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area south to where Hite used to be on the Colorado River, and our ranch on the San Rafael River one mile west of where it joined the Green River.

Back in the early days my family on both my dad’s and mother’s side were Mormon pioneers and had settled...

I know very little about my grandparents except for what I have heard because they all had passed away before I was born. The one exception was my maternal grandmother who passed away when I was very young, and I remember little about her. My mother’s father was named Daniel Gross Brian, and her mother’s name was Ella Barnes. Mr. Brian was a good Mormon and a polygamist. He had a family in Utah and another one in Idaho. He was born March 5, 1835, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Thomas and Martha Wilding O’Brian. His mother...

Father was born in Georgia in 1868, and went to Texas when he was six. He gradually went clear up through Texas and ended up working for big cow outfits in the panhandle, near Dalhart, all through that area where the XIT cattle outfit was later. He finally ended up in western Colorado and eastern Utah. In eastern Utah, not far from the Colorado border, he ran an outfit for Harry Bogert years ago. Eventually went to work for the Preston Nutter Corporation in Utah. He was the cow boss there for years. He worked for Preston Nutter longer than...

I was born in Oaktown, Knox County, Indiana, on May 31, 1921. My parents separated when I was three. I went with my father until I was eight years old. After that things just went to pot, and I never lived with my parents again. I just spent time with this aunt or that uncle or neighbor or what have you. I don’t remember my father too much; I knew him, but I don’t really know him, and the same way with my mother.

Well, after years of that, until I was fourteen, I did everything you could think of,...

I was born in 1913 in Hanksville, but we moved to Green River in 1915. My dad’s name was Joseph Alvin Robison. He was born in Chicago in 1872. His dad and several of his uncles moved to Fillmore, Utah, from Chicago in 1886. Fillmore is west of here, on Interstate I-70 near Richfield. My grandfather, Alvin Locke Robison, moved to Loa in about 1890. He was appointed territorial judge in either 1890 or 1895 by the federal government. One of his main jobs was to prosecute the polygamists. Some called him Satan Robison.

Dad had been married twice. His...

I was born in 1917 in Cannonville, Utah, and am the ninth child in a family of eleven children. At an early age, I suspected that my parents, Sixtus Ellis and Lovisa Cox Johnson, named me Nina to help them keep an accurate count of their children.

My paternal grandfather was Seth G. Johnson. He was one of the early pioneer plural marriage fellows. His father and mother had emigrated from England in 1800 and settled in New England. They came west after the Mormon expulsion from Missouri and Illinois. My father was one of twenty-five children from Seth’s two...

Lowry Seely: My grandfather and grandmother raised their family in Mount Pleasant, Utah. This was before 1900, probably around 1880. Granddad, Orange Seely, was named after the Duke of Orange. After he had converted to the Mormon Church he had been directed by Brigham Young to gather his family and other settlers and go to Emery County and start a settlement. The settlement just naturally got named Orangeville. My father, David Randolph Seely, and mother, Elva Singleton Seely, met in Ferron where her father ran the Singleton Hardware and Grocery store. Our mother grew up there managing that store for...

I had a very secure childhood. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I don’t think we were poor. No one had a lot of money in those days. In fact, we were considered quite well off. I was born in Preston, Idaho. My mother was Scots and my father was Danish. My great grandfather’s name was Nielson, and he was a miller in Denmark. He was taken prisoner during one of the wars with Germany. There were two German soldiers coming toward him. He shot one, but could not reload in time, so the second soldier captured him....

My dad and his dad and the rest of the family left Texas and worked their way up to Wyoming. Dad and the family came to Green River after they left Wyoming. They ran horses out there on Dead Horse Point. They gathered a bunch of horses and shipped them to Boston to sell them. My uncle accompanied the horses to Boston, and when he came back he had on a new suit of clothes. They asked him how much money he got out of the horses, and he said, “That was it.” So they sold the horses. They had...