LOG CABINS

Utah is blessed with some of the most stunning topography I have ever seen. I live in the Grand Canyon State so I know awesome topography. But Utah has Canyonlands, Arches, Capital Reef-Escalante, Zion, and Bryce Canyon National Parks to begin with. Utah has something else – beautiful, tidy Mormon settlements up lush green valleys.  

This last trip, for the most part, I followed Highway 89 up from Flagstaff Arizona, working my way through Kanab near Utah’s southern border with Arizona pretty much all the way to Provo.  A stretch of this incredible country is taken up by the tourist industry surrounding Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks, but starting right after the last tourist trap at Zion’s junction with 89, the valley opens up to small and beautifully kept ranches and farms.  

Nearly 150 years ago, Mormon settlers came to these valleys where the snowmelt fills the Virgin and Sevier Rivers. These early settlers organized the abundant water from the mountains into irrigation systems which would make the land arable and prosperous. This is land where well-muscled, shining horses lope in fields of bright green grass under towering, snow-capped mountains, where the cattle seem extra fat and glossy. This is land that one generation would hand down to the next. This is land that deserved defending, man and woman, shoulder to shoulder, whether from fire to foe. 

Mormons have a tradition of preserving their histories, honoring the pioneers who came before and the elders of their families.  Each small town offers a museum in which the histories of the families settling these valleys are retold.  Often, the museum itself is another relic of the past, a stately home of a prosperous merchant family or the valleys’ first public buildings. 

But the first homes of the first settlers in these valleys would have been settlers homes - sturdy, tight cabins made with logs or indigenous stone. In the early days, large families meant more hands to work the land.  Soon, these farm and ranch families would build large, spacious houses which could accommodate many sons and daughters of the land. 

I imagine that in each one of those large houses, the entire family would gather over tables full of the labor of their own hands. I imagine they told and retold the Mormon Pioneers’ migration to Salt Lake. Most assuredly, they would have told stories of their families’ elders, of years with generous rains that brought bumper crops or many calves and foals, of the laborious rebuilding after destructive floods, of winters so severe that nearly all the livestock were lost. Perhaps the families swapped stories of sons of great or questionable courage or recounted the beautiful daughters who became matriarchs of their own families. The children of these valleys didn’t have to ‘come home’ for their families’ stories; they never left these green and orderly valleys. 

Curiously incongruous with many of these tidy ranches and farms, clearly deserted but maintained log or stone cabins dot the farms and ranches. At first I assumed these structures were like the corn bins or mangers in my native Missouri, left-over buildings repurposed for the industry of the land. But as the miles passed and the number of these structures grew, I began to realize these cabins have not been kept for storage or shelter but rather something my tradition would call shrines. 

The obvious importance of these cabins started me thinking about the matriarch and patriarchs of the area who lived in these cabins.  I wondered if the stories they told would be similar to the stories of my family, snippets of family history that told something about my ancestors.  Like how our matriarch, my beautiful, part-Cherokee grandmother Victoria, chose my grandfather among her available suitors. Grandfather David had the advantage over the other subsistence-farming suitors - a good horse named Old Dan, an asset in very rural northeastern Oklahoma in the early 1900s. Old Dan is like a family ancestor to me.  

I thought about the stories Grandfather David would tell of his father and grandfather building the tiny, stone church which still stands near Grove. To come from a family that helped build a church, a structure that has lasted well over a century – well that is something for which to be proud.  I thought of the story of my own Mother’s December birth in a tiny, two-room cabin on a table in front of the pot-belly stove, the warmest spot in the cabin. I thought of Grandfather David’s mother, the area mid-wife, helping Victoria usher her own grandchild in to a cold and frosty Oklahoma winter. I felt the strength of my own ancestors as I drove through these lush Utah valleys. 

Remembering my own family’s stories, I began to suspect these incongruously rustic cabins and their stories might have been kept to remind each new generation where they came from and to influence their present. I think ‘relic’ is the wrong word to use when describing a stone church or a log cabin from our ancestral past. ‘Relic’ is a word that implies its usefulness is in the past. I suspect that is simply not true of these log cabins. The cabins, not unlike the church I can still visit when I pass through Oklahoma, have a place in this present. Knowing where we come from influences our present decisions, making it so much easier to decide who we want to be and where we want to go. That is the gift of our ancestors.