Explorers and Surveyors

"The whole country is a region of naked rock of many colors, with cliffs and buttes about us and towering mountains in the distance."

-John Wesley Powell's journal entry on July 28, 1869

 

Dominguez and Escalante

The Waterpocket Fold Country was the last territory to be charted in the contiguous 48 states. In 1776, two Franciscan priests, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, left Santa Fe with the intention of finding a route to missions in Monterey, California. They made detailed recordings of their findings through Arizona, Colorado, and Utah during their trip. They befriended Ute tribes by presenting them with gifts and promising to teach them to farm and raise livestock.

 

John C. Fremont

In the winter of 1853, John Charles Fremont passed through Utah and Colorado, attempting to find a northern railroad route to the Pacific Ocean. The expedition was difficult and the explorers were forced to eat their horses before stumbling upon a Mormon settlement. Fremont took care to document their journey, hiring a daguerreotypist, Solomon Nunes Carvalho, a Jewish South Carolinian. Carvalho took nearly 300 daguerreotypes, most of which were unfortunately lost in a fire after the expedition. One of the surviving images depicts rock monoliths located in the North District of Capitol Reef, known as "Mom, Pop, and Henry." Fremont and his men also recorded their encounters with Ute and Southern Paiute Indians.

 

John Charles Fremont's expedition passed through the North District of Capitol Reef as evidenced by this pen and ink reproduction of the daguerreotype taken by Carvalho, and a photo of the same rock monoliths.

NPS

 

The Waterpocket Fold is mapped (but not named) between the Henry Mountains and the Aquarius Plateau (which includes Boulder Mountain) on this 1875 map created by John Wesley Powell's expedition.

Library of Congress/ USGS

John Wesley Powell

John Wesley Powell, a former Major for the Union Army and avid naturalist, first traveled with nine geologists and geographers down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon in 1869. Powell was formulating a theory about the formation of the Colorado Plateau and Colorado River. Geologists Clarence Dutton, Grove Karl Gilbert, and topographer Almon Thompson explored the Capitol Reef region during the Powell expeditions in the area. During the 1871-1872 expedition, Thompson named the large geologic monocline "Waterpocket Fold" because of the many waterpockets (depressions in the Navajo Sandstone that collect and hold water).

Traveling on the Colorado River, the men explored Zion and Bryce Canyons as well as the surrounding Henry and Uinta Mountains. They encountered Ute, Paiute, and other native peoples, studying their ways of life and recording their culture.

Read the chapter on Early Explorers in the Capitol Reef National Park Administrative History.

Continue forward in Capitol Reef's timeline of human influence to learn about Pioneer Settlers or travel back in time to the Fremont Culture.