National parks pass it on

We are huge fans of National Parks spaces. The NPS administers so many amazing places. Their annual pass is astoundingly good value. We just started our second one, and I wanted to keep track of where and when we use it.

But there's a history too, to this particular instance of the American dream, that I don't want to gloss over. It's not the pastiche of feel-good anecdote and Manifest Destiny grand horn music crescendo you'll get from watching, say, Ken Burns's doco series (sigh, made my teeth hurt a bit.) Rather, a dark underbelly story. These amazing places - that give me so much enjoyment, tranquillity, wonder, and delight - came at a cost. As so often, it was marginalised peoples who paid disproportionately, as native peoples were in many instances bullied off their ancestral land to make room for tourists to have their weekend hikes and nature experiences. (For an overview, see this article).

Huh, I started his post only intending to note down every use of the new parks pass ... Guess I had something else to get off my chest too.

Small rooms of Yuma

It was mild enough when we went there last month, but Yuma gets as hot in the summer as you'd expect for a town within spitting distance of the Mexican border. It's an interesting little place in its own quiet way, just south of the confluence of two mighty southwestern rivers: the Gila and the Colorado.

Springs and the Calligraphy Highway pt 3: Meadow Mountains

This post might have triggering content

After a gentle walk along the river an reservoir at Pine Valley, we packed up. We were invited to stay another night, but Monday will come, alas, and with it bring work.

We drove back out and turned north. A few miles from Central is the site of a notorious, inexplicable mass murder: the Mountain Meadows massacre. There are four separate sites; a men's memorial and a women's memorial, a gravesite with cairn, and an overlook of the cairn and the valley where the tragedy took place in autumn 1857.

No one really knows why the massacre happened. The Fancher pioneer party, who had camped near a spring to let their beasts forage, were besieged, during which several men died. Then, under a white flag, over a hundred men, women and children were murdered. Only the toddlers were spared - those thought too young to talk. Apparently at least one baby died from the same bullet that killed its father. There is a report that some of the girls were raped before they were murdered.

There's no doubt that the mass murder was carried out by local Mormons and Indians working in concert. One local Mormon leader ended up taking the fall for it. John D. Lee went on the run (back when that was totally a thing in the wild west) and operated Lee's Ferry above the north-eastern end of the Grand Canyon for several years before he was indicted and executed. (Before there was a bridge at Navajo Crossing, the ferry service a few miles upstream was the last even remotely predictable crossing of the Colorado for a few hundred miles. The area was extremely remote - it's still fairly remote! - and they didn't arrest him until 1874.)

But really, John Lee can't actually have been the only one who was responsible - why was he made the scapegoat? Why was this thing done in the first place? How can it ever have seemed like a good idea to anyone? There were plenty of inflammatory factors, but how the transition was made from outrage over trespassing, even allegations of well-poisoning, etc to planned mass murder including children, is beyond me - maybe always will be beyond me. There are some failures of imagination that I can't feel are failures of character.

The overlook is peaceful enough, and so is the valley's gently rolling, tree-dotted, fenced pastureland. The landmark site is well cared for and has been brought into being by the descendants of the murderers and the victims. It is a good place for quiet reflection. As we read the names of the dead, my sight blurred. Sometimes, we humans are a strange and terrible species, and sometimes it is a strange and terrible world we make.