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Historic Inscriptions on the Colorado Plateau . . . and Tales from the True GRIT

Of valuable historic record and graffiti, never the tween shall meet - but they do

By Andrew Gulliford

G.R.I.T.

For information about Glen Canyon National Recreation Area’s graffiti removal program, call 928-608-6350 or visit click here

We had scrambled down cliffs off Cedar Mesa in southeast Utah trying to access a ruin we had seen with binoculars. As we faced Navajo Mountain far in the distance, a thousand feet below us the canyon narrowed and then dropped again finding its way to the San Juan River. We had descended four ledges, and as the sun warmed the cliff face we walked west and there hidden under a white sandstone overhang stood three granary door openings.

My friend shot a few quick digital photos of the ancestral Puebloan granaries, including the interiors, and we kept on hiking until we were below the remote ruin staring up at remarkable cliff houses with at least five beckoning doorways. All day we saw no one.

No trails lead to the ruin. No footprints surrounded it. We could have been the first visitors in 800 years. Because there was no safe way up into the dark openings, we turned and climbed out of the canyon. That night we reviewed the images on a laptop computer, satisfied that we had discovered a truly rare and remote archaeological site when something appeared on the computer screen from within one of the darkened granaries. Incised into the wall, a few feet from the entrance, were the letters "JW".

Of course! John Wetherill, one of the Wetherill brothers who had tramped across the Colorado Plateau in search of prehistoric sites. They had turned to Cedar Mesa and Southeast Utah in the mid-1890s after discovering major sites in what would become Mesa Verde National Park. Chagrined, we realized we were not the first visitors to the ruin or to the granaries. The Wetherills had gone before us. At least we were in good company.

Their carved initials and names are historic inscriptions, signatures from the past that help to date and place their expeditions. Carving one's name and date on rocks and boulders was a standard response to being in remote places on the Colorado Plateau, far from civilization and close to danger.

At El Morro National Monument in New Mexico, Spanish Conquistadors left their inscriptions south of the Zuni Mountains. For 300 years, priests, soldiers and explorers left their names on Inscription Rock. In flowing Spanish, they wrote of their travels including the 1605 carving, Paso por aqui el adelantado Don Juan de Onate del descrubrimiento de la mar del sur a 16 de Abril de 1605, or, in english, "Passed by here the Governor Don Juan de Onate, from the discovery of the Sea of the South on the 16th of April, 1605," meaning the discovery of the Gulf of California.

Explorers left their marks in case they never returned. Across the Southwest, cowboys, miners, settlers and Mormon pioneers left hundreds of inscriptions. In 1776, as their party became trapped in a fierce fall storm along the Colorado River, Friars Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante carved in elegant script paso por aqui, 1776, "We passed by here." Journal entries reveal the difficult straits they were in.

A fast-moving storm trapped them along the river's edge in Glen Canyon. The friars wrote that on November 6, "We were stopped for a long time by a strong blizzard and tempest consisting of rain and thick hailstones amid horrendous thunder claps and lightning flashes." The storm was so treacherous, they wrote: "We recited the Virgin's litany, for her to implore some relief for us, and God willed for the tempest to end." In equal desperation, Mormon scouts also inscribed sandstone.

On December 27, 1889, caught in a winter storm while trying to find a safe route for 250 families with the Hole-in-the-Rock expedition, George Hobbs, one of four Mormon scouts, carved his name atop Comb Ridge. Hobbs wrote in his journal: "Night overtook us. We camped in this small canyon, this being our third day without food. I cut my name in the rock with that date I was there, not knowing I would survive the journey."

Cortez, Colo.-based historian and guide Fred Blackburn has researched Southwestern inscriptions. He defines them as "a primary historical record" and "a way to compare written history to original history." Blackburn has documented historical inscriptions at Mesa Verde National Park and Navajo National Monument. For him finding an historical name or date is "like treasure hunting." He loves to put the information together with the event "especially if the written history is wrong or not recorded at all."

To mark their travels for posterity, explorers and pioneers used knives, pencils, and charcoal. Writing about inscriptions in his book Butch Cassidy Slept Here, James Knipmeyer notes: "In the Colorado Plateau region I have found them lightly scratched, with perhaps a knifepoint or horseshoe nail, pecked in with some sort of metal tool, possibly a miner's pick, and sometimes carved deeply with a chisel. Some have been painted with an actual pigment, but most of this type have been made with axle-grease from a wagon, wet charcoal, a fire blackened stick, or even the lead of a bullet." Knipmeyer adds, "All of them proclaim to the world in one form or another that ?I was here. I am a part of history.'"

Blackburn has found that within any site, including thousand-year-old cliff dwellings, "when one person signs, especially on beautifully plastered walls, other people then record their names." The original inscriptions are valuable historic information, attests historian and canyoneer Steve Allen. He says, "Back then there was a story to be told. With those signatures and inscriptions we can follow pioneer paths."

But understandable behavior during the exploration and settlement phase of the American West centuries ago in no way condones recent writing on rocks. Wanton graffiti mars the Colorado Plateau, because each year hundreds of thoughtless people carve on rock and deface public lands. The only legacy they're leaving is proof of their idiocy. Across the Plateau the Leave No Trace ethic has a long way to go.

Jim Stiles, Moab publisher and author of Brave New West, noted in his book that Superintendent Bates Wilson from Arches National Monument wrote in May 1956, "The increasing desire by fools to carve their names in public places has reached the highest level possible in Arches at Delicate Arch." Stiles added, "Later, graffiti vandalism got worse."

At Glen Canyon National Recreation Area on the shore of Lake Powell, the National Park Service recruits volunteers to remove graffiti by scrubbing sandstone. Hoping to see some historic inscriptions while helping to remove some vandalism, I joined up, becoming a member of the Graffiti Removal Intervention Team (GRIT). Six of us lived for a week on the 52-foot houseboat named "The True GRIT."

I like traversing canyons with a backpack and climbing sticks, but working with the GRIT group we carried buckets with squirt bottles of water, hammers, wire and bristle brushes, safety goggles, and work gloves. The hammers were to smash signatures a half inch or more in depth prior to smoothing over the rock with wire brushes and later bristle brushes. Captain Gene Longo taught us that "the final strokes should go with the grain to leave as little mark as possible." We learned to tell from the sandstone's patina how new the graffiti is, and that defacing boulders and cliffs can result in a misdemeanor charge and a $6,000 federal fine.

As an avid hiker, giving back to public lands by scrubbing sandstone seems an important part of "wilderness tithing." I spend a lot of time on public turf, so why not give back? Bill and Carol Williams and Bob and Vicki Schwartz gave back by donating the True GRIT, the vintage 1980s Skipperliner houseboat. After learning safety procedures, we got into the graffiti removal groove.

We would start the process by anchoring the True GRIT then taking the Park Service's runabout, a faster boat in which to explore other areas. One morning, I entered a narrow canyon, reflecting on what Glen Canyon must have been like a century ago. After rounding a bend, I saw four names scrawled on rock. Historic inscriptions have detail and context but 90 percent of the graffiti on Lake Powell are first names only with no context whatsoever.

Following procedure, I drew the names on a pad, photographed the graffiti, and - with relish - reached for a steel brush. Within minutes, the names were gone. With a soft-bristle brush to tidy the surface and a spray bottle of water to soften the stone, I tidied the surface. Feeling deeply satisfied with eliminating names from a quartet of Lake Powell morons, I rejoined the GRIT group. Captain Longo and his wife Cindy explained, "our goal is to get as much of the lake's canyons as natural as possible."

The next day was the same. A little graffiti here, a scrub there. We were doing our job but we had yet to encounter the true tracks of Americanus slobvious, known to carve on the 1,900 miles of Lake Powell shoreline. With only a few days to go, we motored up West Canyon into a slot canyon. Not thinking we'd find anything, we stepped off the boat with trash bags and walked up the slot. I found a dinosaur scrawled with chalk on the canyon wall and, preparing to retrieve my brush bucket, I heard shouts from deeper in the slot.

In that warm and sacred light, beneath steep ascending walls, I walked up the canyon with reverence as if entering a cathedral. I love the light in slot canyons and how their beauty evokes hushed tones. I walked toward the quiet voices of my crew, Linda Henry, Jean Schwarz and Ada Hatch, all from Page, Ariz. When I got to the end, I was mesmerized. We'd found the mother lode.

I was stunned by the beauty of the tiny canyon and the size of the chockstone caught in a crack at its end. Then, I was dumbfounded to see dozens of senseless names sprawled over the dark, sensuous sandstone up to 30 feet above, covering probably 100 square feet. Mindless minions on party boats had found this slot and had left their spoor, beginning with a name and a date, 1992. Shock at the amount of graffiti turned to intense anger. I doubted we could clean it all off. But we pulled out our secret weapons: long-handled broken oars with four steel brushes secured to their ends with duct tape. We even had a smaller, banjo-size paddle with its own brushes to exert maximum torque when we leaned into the sandstone. Scrub, scrub, scrub.

As I pounded on the deeper carvings with a hammer, and brushed and sanded them, I thought about the most historic inscription ever found at Lake Powell - the 1776 Dominguez and Escalante inscription. In 1994, two vandals named "Rob & Kathi" had scribbled their names over the 18th-century inscription. The damage was so deep and the patina so fragile that the vandalism cannot be removed. A digital photographic process can reproduce the original carving but the inscription itself will remain covered over.

As a historian, that act of vandalism incensed me so strongly that it compelled me to join the True GRIT. That anger now fueled my arms and shoulders as we worked to remove the mindless letters and gouges, some more than an inch deep.

In a previous year, GRIT volunteers recorded 1,400 hours eliminating 17,280 square feet of paint and rock graffiti. In our week, we sanded 195 square feet.

But, like the plague, graffiti has to stop at its source. Every year, families put their initials on rocks as part of annual houseboat vacations. As volunteer Schwarz explains, "Once somebody starts, it snowballs." Hatch agrees. She says, "Once they see two or three names then they want to carve theirs," which is clearly evident on the Escalante Arm, at the base of Rainbow Bridge, on Delicate Arch, along Capitol Reef and at Wahweap Window.

On 180 million-year-old Navajo sandstone, modern graffiti defaces and disfigures the beauty and mystery of the Colorado Plateau. Historical inscriptions with names and dates 50 years and older have value, context, and are part of the archaeological record. And they're protected under federal law.

Beneath the top of Cedar Mesa, looking out across the sacred landscape of the plateau, we enjoyed finding John Wetherill's century-old initials but we didn't leave our own.

Andrew Gulliford is a historian, photographer, and professor of Southwest Studies and History at Fort Lewis College in Durango. He can be reached at Gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.