This Was the Place: the Making and Unmaking of Utah

184 UHQ I VOL. 82 I NO. 3 utah state historical society historical state utah The Four Corners. The Four — This was NO. 3 NO. I the place 82 VOL. I The Making and Unmaking of Utah UHQ B Y JARED FARMER 185 How many Utahns have driven out of their way to get to a place that’s really no place, the intersection of imaginary lines: Four Corners, the only spot where the boundaries of four U.S. states converge. Here, at the surveyor’s monument, tourists play geographic Twister, placing one foot and one hand in each quadrant. In 2009, the Deseret News raised a minor ruckus by announcing that the marker at Four Corners was 2.5 miles off. Geocachers with GPS devices had supposedly discovered a screw-up of nineteenth-century surveyors. The implication: no four-legged tourist had ever truly straddled the state boundaries. A television news anchor in Denver called it “the geographic shot heard around the West.” In fact, the joke was on the Deseret News. After receiving a pointed rebuttal from the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, the newspaper printed a retraction with this unintentionally amusing headline: “Four Corners Monument Is Indeed Off Mark—But Not by Distance Reported Earlier and in Opposite Direction.”1 The confusion stemmed from the fact that geocachers had anachronis- tically used the Greenwich Meridian as their longitudinal reference, though the U.S. did not adopt the Greenwich standard until 1912. The mapmaker in 1875 who first determined the location of Four Corners actually got it right; he was only “off mark” by the subsequent standard of satellite technology. More to the point, surveyors after him validated his work and made the boundary concrete with an official marker. As America’s chief surveyor explained to reporters, “Once a boundary 1 Lynn Arave, “Four Corners Monument is Indeed Off Mark,” Deseret News, April 23, 2009. monument has been set and accepted, it generally your inner compass. does define the forever, even if later found to be not located where originally intended.”2 The issue here was not just academic or journalis- The making of Utah was related to a larger U.S. proj- tic. It had economic ramifications. Tourists won’t ect: the national map. And this national map was a come to Four Corners unless they have faith in the product of the so-called Rectangular Survey. If you rightness of imaginary lines. This matters to Navajo take the perspective of, say, Dead Horse Point, it jewelers, hoteliers, and gas station owners. The seems preposterous that surveyors drew straight land where Utah meets three other states belongs to lines over jumbled topography to create legal the sovereign Navajo Nation. To refute the Deseret boundaries. Nature abhors squares. But the United News, the tribe fired off a press release: “Four States—indeed, even its precursor, the Continen- Corners Monument Still the Legally Recognized tal Congress—fell in love with the rationality and Landmark Despite Reports.”3 mathematical purity of the grid: a nation composed of squares within squares. The basic cartographic This little story of place-making has a big moral: U.S. building block is the section, or one square mile. Put NO. 3 NO. I states such as Utah are examples of the make-be- together thirty-six sequentially numbered sections lieve made real. And like all imagined things, they and you have a township of six miles squared. After have histories. the Civil War, U.S. surveyors took this quadrilateral thinking to the next level and mapped out a series “Landscape is history made visible,” wrote the dis- of more or less rectangular territories and states cerning critic J. B. Jackson.4 What did he mean by adjoining one another. Today, easterners often con- VOL. 82 VOL. I that? Think about discoverers, conquerors, invad- fuse Wyoming with Colorado, and Utah with Ari- ers, colonists, settlers, migrants, pioneers, and other zona and New Mexico (much like westerners trans- people on the move: all throughout the past, in all pose Vermont and New Hampshire). From an East UHQ four corners of the world, people have encountered Coast point of view, the big western rectangles seem unfamiliar spaces and then transformed them, more or less interchangeable. 186 familiarized them, into places. People give mean- ing to landforms and thereby make landmarks. In fact, boundary lines matter. Even though they They place names on mental maps and tell stories are invisible on the ground—even though they are about those named and mapped places. They burn, social artifices, environmental lies—they create cultivate, build, and otherwise remodel the terrain: reality. They can engender or reinforce differences, they turn land into landscape. This endless pro- inequalities, and conflicts. Consider the Mason- cess—simultaneously local and global—can never Dixon Line, the Radcliffe Line, the Berlin Wall, the be harmless. Outside of Antarctica and scattered DMZ, the West Bank Barrier, or the U.S.-Mexico islands, there has been no true terra incognita (land border. Or, on a local scale, think about the Salt Lak- unknown) or terra nullius (land unoccupied) for ers who cross over to Evanston, Wyoming, for fire- millennia; no uninhabited, unstoried, unmeaning- works (or now to Colorado for marijuana), or who ful terrestrial space. Thus every act of place-making drive the opposite direction on I-80 to West Wen- has on some level been an act of remaking, if not dis- dover, Nevada, for gambling and other adult enter- placement—an act of cultural encroachment, even tainments. Some residents of Logan travel from violence. Or, to drive the point home: the making of one part of Cache Valley to another—to the Idaho our Utah involved the unmaking of older Utahs. side—for lotto tickets and malt liquor. Three hun- dred fifty miles to the south, just over the Arizona My purpose in this essay is to get you thinking, border, members of the FLDS church still practice through various examples, about place creation and polygamy. Colorado City’s location was chosen in landscape loss; and, along the way, to unsettle your part to elude Arizona law enforcement. Because of mental geography, and adjust—ever so slightly— the awesome barrier of the Grand Canyon, the state government in Phoenix historically found it diffi- 2 Ibid. cult to enforce antibigamy laws in the Arizona Strip, 3 Navajo Parks and Recreation Department, “Four Corners a swath of land effectively in Utah. Monument Still the Legally Recognized Landmark Despite Reports,” April 22, 2009, accessed April 4, 2014, http:// navajonationparks.org/pr/pr_4Cmarker.htm. Borders are as mutable and arbitrary as they are 4 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at important. Recall how the map of Europe changed America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 10. in 1918 and again in 1945 and again in 1989. Look at Africa before and after decolonization. Com- man tourists come to Monument Valley on the pared to Africa, the map of North America has been Navajo Nation to experience the “Indian Country” quite stable for over a century. But go back to the of the Southwest, of which Utah’s largest county, nineteenth century, and you see the U.S. national San Juan, is one small part. Other tourists come to map in a constant state of flux, as the republic Salt Lake City to see something that seems equally gained new lands and states through purchases, exotic: “Mormon Country.” Geographers call it the wars, treaties, and referenda. Prior to the west- Mormon Culture Region, which, for them, includes ern states came the western territories. For exam- southeastern Idaho, southwestern Wyoming, ple, the original Oregon Territory included all of southeastern Nevada, and the valley of the Little present-day Washington State as well as Oregon. Colorado in Arizona. Mormon settlers, newly ensconced in their Great Basin headquarters, proposed a state called Deseret When contemporary Utahns appeal to a that would have stretched from the Sierra to the supraregional identity, they tend to speak of the Rockies. Even though Congress spurned that pro- Intermountain West, the Mountain West, or the posal, it created a Utah Territory much larger than Rocky Mountain Region. The locution Intermoun- today’s state. During the long probationary period tain West originated around 1900. A coalition of NO. 3 NO. that ended only after the LDS church promised to boosters, LDS and non-Mormon alike, promoted I give up polygamy, Congress repeatedly sawed off Salt Lake City—the “Mormon Metropolis”—as a chunks of Utah, awarding them to Nevada and later regional capital. Given that Las Vegas was barely a to Nebraska and Colorado; it even entertained the cow town, and Boise not much more, these hopeful idea of shrinking Utah to a narrow strip or dividing Salt Lakers had a point. In the same era, Spokane, Salt Lake City right down the middle. Thus the cur- Washington, billed itself as the hub of a rival “Inland VOL. 82 VOL. rent semirectangular shape of Utah was the result of Empire.” With the coming of freeways and airports, I happenstance and politics as well as the grid. It had these geographic inventions (based on railroad nothing to do with nature. networks) became passé. Today, the best-known Inland Empire (or “I.E.”) is in Southern California. UHQ Borders and boundaries are not the only invisible The preferred metageographical container for Utah lines that create reality. There’s also the issue of has become Rocky Mountain. 187 metageography, a word that refers to large-scale geographic concepts such as continents. Students The current regional identification with moun- today learn that the world has seven continents; tains—our high country bias—replaced an earlier Wikipedia agrees.

Load more