Site Could Yield Clues to Indian Mystery

For more than 50 years, Waldo Wilcox never told the secret of Range Creek. He shooed away the curious and allowed just a handful of scientists to explore his 4,000-acre ranch, deep in the narrow sandstone canyons of eastern Utah.

But on Wednesday, the secret was out.

The 74-year-old cowboy, who recently sold his ranch to the federal government, had been sitting on one of the most extensive ancient Indian sites in North America. He offered the first public tour of it Wednesday to a group of reporters.

The land’s archeological value, scientists say, rivals that of Mesa Verde in Colorado and New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. Granaries, stone houses, rock art and thousands of arrowheads from the Fremont culture lay on lush canyon floors, atop cliffs and chiseled on stone walls.

Researchers say the sheer quantity of the material and its pristine condition may help answer one of the most enduring questions in North American archeology -- why did the Fremont, who lived between roughly AD 600 and 1300, disappear?

“The opportunities this site offers are unbelievable,” said Kevin Jones, a Utah state archeologist. “It’s one of the most significant sites in America today; it’s truly a national treasure.”

In just the last few weeks, the site has offered up intriguing clues about the fate of the Fremont. Archeologists have found dozens of granaries, or food storage areas, high on the cliff sides. “The fact that they would go to these lengths to build hidden granaries indicates that others might [have been] trying to get to them,” Jones said.

One major theory is that invaders displaced the Fremont. Another is that drought forced them to move. Both those ideas have also been explored by archeologists trying to explain the sudden disappearance of the Anasazi -- contemporaries of the Fremont who lived in what today is Arizona, New Mexico and southern Colorado.

At Range Creek, the Fremont farmed corn, squash and beans and built hundreds of semi-submerged homes called pit houses. The foundations of the houses are evident up and down the canyons. Many overlook open meadows, with cottonwoods swaying along slow moving streams. The earth nearby is littered with translucent arrowheads, bits of pottery and grinding stones.

Archeologists say the absence of ancient trash heaps shows that the Fremont who settled here left quickly, maybe in less than a year. And they left around AD 1300 -- about the same time the culture vanished.

“There was this radical shift in life ways, and maybe this place can answer what that shift was,” said Duncan Metcalfe, curator of archeology at the University of Utah Natural History Museum.

Humans have inhabited Utah for 11,000 years. The Fremont, hunter-gatherers who also farmed, lived in areas that are now Idaho and northwestern Colorado. But present-day Utah was their heartland. Fremont sites are abundant throughout the state, and in some places home builders routinely encounter artifacts when digging foundations.

What makes Range Creek so special, archeologists say, is its near-flawless condition. That’s because of Wilcox, a blunt-talking cattle rancher with a penchant for Wrangler jeans and a passion for history.

He bought the ranch in 1951. For years, he quietly enjoyed the Fremont sites while jealously guarding them.

When an archeologist would ask to explore the ranch, Wilcox agreed only if he could watch. He once evicted a scientist for hammering a petroglyph.

“I just thought it was something to be protected,” said Wilcox, wearing a cowboy hat with a bit of horsehair sticking out the top. “I figured if I died, I wouldn’t want some hippie digging up my dead body.”

Wilcox once found the mummified remains of a Fremont man, woman and child. The man was wrapped in strips of beaver skin, and the woman and child were encased in cedar bark. He said the bodies were taken to an Arizona museum -- he wouldn’t say by whom -- and he never heard of them again.

As he got older, Wilcox said, he was approached by the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, the federal Bureau of Land Management and the state of Utah, asking if he would sell his ranch so the ruins could be preserved.

“I didn’t really want to, but I figured if I died, I’d have no say in what happened to the land,” Wilcox said, noting that he didn’t want developers to get it.

About a year ago, he sold for about $2.5 million and moved to Green River, about 60 miles south. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources now oversees his old land.

All along, Wilcox worried that public attention could doom the site. It now appears his fears may have been warranted.

In the last week, three Fremont knife blades, an arrowhead and a pot have been taken from the site, said Joel Boomgarden, a University of Utah graduate student who is working at the ranch.

“Some places are already being looted,” he said, standing among dozens of tiny flags used to mark artifacts lying among the sagebrush and juniper trees. “Some people are coming thinking it’s like Chaco Canyon. They are digging for stuff that’s not there. The Fremont built these structures as if they’d be here for a thousand years, and then [they] just disappeared.”

Shells from the Pacific Ocean have been found at the site, along with the finest examples of Fremont figurines anywhere.

Perhaps the most enigmatic relic of Fremont life is the rock art found all over the ranch. Long serpents, men with bows and arrows and pronghorn antelope are chiseled into sandstone walls. There also are the classic Fremont figures -- tall, trapezoidal-shaped beings with tapered limbs and odd projections emanating from their heads.

Such art can be found throughout Utah’s canyon country, and archeologists say they have no idea what it means.

Wilcox walked up to a detailed etching of a man’s hand.

“All they had was a rock to make that,” he said. “I couldn’t do it with a hammer and chisel.”

Metcalfe plans to assemble a team of scientists for a 10-year project to explore the ranch and learn more about the life and disappearance of the Fremont. In the last month, he said, he has found 225 significant archeological sites on the ranch -- including small villages, granaries and plazas.

So far there have been no objections to the excavation from tribes in the area, because most don’t feel much kinship with the Fremont, archeologists say.

The big question is how to let the public visit the ranch without harming the thousands of artifacts scattered throughout. People now can enter the area only on foot or horseback. It’s a 12-mile trip from a gated road to the Fremont sites.

“We want to share the information with the public. But if everyone in Utah came here this weekend, the place would be loved to death,” Jones said. “There is a management working group trying to develop a policy to protect the sites and let people see it.”

Wilcox was skeptical.

“I don’t see any way they can protect it now,” he said, looking over a field of golden flowers. “But what do I know? I’m just an old hillbilly.”