SOUTHERN UTAH — In the winter of 1872, Thomas and Elizabeth Kane, and their sons Evan and Bill, were on a two-week tour of Utah hosted by the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints President Brigham Young.
When they reached Fort Harmony, just south of Kanarraville, The family from Pennsylvania spent the night at the home of John D. Lee before moving on to St. George the next day.
“We were told to prepare for eighteen miles of rough road when we left Kannarra,” Elizabeth later wrote, “and we certainly encountered them. We were fairly in the rocks, and the lava blocks are the flintiest stones I ever heard ring against horseshoe and wheel tire.”
But the worst was yet to come as the party confronted the hair-raising thousand-foot descent down the Black Ridge on the hardest stretch of road on their long journey.
Elizabeth realized something was up when a man walked back to their carriage with a message from Brigham Young: “Please watch yon crack, Mrs. Kane,” he told her. Soon after seeing “a fold or wrinkle” on the horizon ahead she realized it was “a crack in the earth” directly in their path.
“A few minutes more, and we are winding down a narrow road painfully excavated along the side of what I now see to be a chasm, sheer down into which I can look hundreds of feet.”
She gazed at the sight in “fascinated terror” as the party wound “in and out of the corners of the great chasm, making short half-turns.” She was greatly relieved when they finally reached the bottom and could rest in Pintura.
Today we make the three-mile journey over the Black Ridge in air-conditioned comfort at 80-miles an hour. For early pioneers, crossing the Black Ridge was a frightening ordeal. The jagged volcanic rock that fills Ash Creek Canyon made getting to and from St. George one challenging obstacle never to be forgotten.
Wagons often broke down as they made the descent, and travelers were rewarded for their trouble with a hard slog through deep sand as they continued south. It was a passage that bedeviled the pioneers for decades, but it was also the lifeline between Utah’s Dixie and the rest of the state.
Even on horseback it was a rough patch, as Catholic Fathers Silvestre Escalante and Francisco Domínguez noted in the history of their expedition through what was to become Utah. In the fall of 1776, two Paiute guides led the group into the canyon where they “entered a ridge cut entirely of black lava rock which lies between two high sierras by way of a gap.”
Halfway into their descent the guides suddenly disappeared.
“We applauded their cleverness in having brought us through a place so well suited for carrying out their ruse so surely and easily,” Escalante recorded. They “continued south for a league with great hardship on account of so much rock,” before camping beside a cottonwood grove near Ash Creek.
Mountain man Jedediah Smith may have been the next European-American to travel over the Black Ridge as he made his way from the Great Salt Lake to California in the summer of 1826.
Two decades later Parley P. Pratt led a group of Mormon pioneers in an exploration of Southern Utah. They reached the Black Ridge in late 1849, where Pratt reported that the company was “forced to leave the stream [Ash Creek] and take to our right over the hills for many miles …” before they reached the site of modern Pintura.
Recognizing the importance of the route for the colonization of Southern Utah, Brigham Young asked Pratt whether “a wagon road could be made across the Black Ridge down to the Rio Virgen.” The answer was not encouraging, but in 1856 Jacob Hamblin succeeded in leading a wagon company over the ridge.
Hamblin felt compelled to attempt the crossing as word of Indian trouble reached him at his little settlement on the Santa Clara. Hamblin and his fellow Indian missionaries wanted the shortest route possible to reach the safety of Fort Harmony, just north of the Black Ridge.
Mary Judd, who was in the party, recorded what happened when they reached the Black Ridge:
“With quite a precipitous ascent of two miles, and covered with boulders of black volcanic rock, interspersed with brush and cedar trees it looked impractical for wagons … We had torn our clothes terribly traveling through brush and rocks with no road of any kind.”
But pushing aside boulders as they went, they somehow made it through. They were greeted with surprise and a welcome dinner at Fort Harmony.
Later that year, Peter Shirts, the Iron County Road Commissioner, believed he had found a workable route down the west side of Black Ridge closer to Pine Valley Mountain. The main drawback, however, was a deep, broad canyon. To traverse it, Shirts created a dugway that was so steep that travelers had to carefully ease their wagons over the edge to reach the other side.
It became known as “Peter’s Leap,” and using the route was not for the faint of heart — as Robert Covington found when he led a group of southern converts to St. George. Like others after them, the party had to chain their wagons together, letting “the hind one hold back the front ones.”
Believing there had to be a better way, John D. Lee and Elisha H. Groves determined to make a more usable path. That they did, completing their work in the spring of 1860. Even with the improvements, travelers found the road a formidable hazard to life and limb.
Hugh Moon wrote of his descent down the ridge: “The brethren told us we should soon come to Jacob’s Twist and Johnson’s Twist, but I thought we had come to the Devil’s Twist. It was down into a sandy canyon and remarkably crooked … [littered with] black nasty rocks that looked as if the Lord had made them for nothing but to bluff off our enemies and spoil the land.”
Swiss convert George Staheli was equally disappointed with the route when his cornet, which he had tied high on his wagon to protect it from harm, came loose from the jarring ride and fell under a wagon wheel and was crushed.
Despite its hazards, the road was increasingly important to the settlers and they continued to improve it over the next decade. Mormon pioneers did the work using “labor tithing” and local taxes to provide men and material.
In 1868, the territorial legislature appropriated funds to help, and Erastus Snow was able to write to Brigham Young later that year with news that “work upon the Black Ridge Road is being prosecuted to completion.”
The new road, located on the east side of Ash Creek, became known as “the county road” and was used for the next six decades. Sections of it can still be seen today.
But the “county road,” was still only a one-lane dirt road with turnouts. Travelers of all stripes feared, but were compelled to use it until 1924 when yet another road was built, this time on the west side of the Ridge “along the old pioneer route” created decades before.
The new road became known as the Arrowhead Highway, then later renamed as U.S. Highway 91. The section of I-15 that crosses the Black Ridge, built in the late 1960s, pretty much follows that same path.
Perhaps as we speed effortlessly over the Black Ridge today, we might think back on those old roads, the pioneers who made them, and the challenges Elizabeth Kane and those early Southern Utah settlers faced in passing over the “crack in the earth” known today as the Black Ridge.
Ed. note: Sources for this article include “Conquering the Black Ridge: The Communitarian Road in Pioneer Utah,” by Todd Compton, published in the Summer 2014 edition of Utah Historical Quarterly, and “Twelve Mormon Homes: Visited in Succession on a Journey Through Utah to Arizona,” by Elizabeth Wood Kane.
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