John D. Lee hiding spot - Lonely Dell 1872

“You had to struggle to make a living out here. You had to have a real backbone,” Clela Johnson said recently, while visiting Lees Ferry, Ariz.

Johnson lives in southern Utah. But her grandfather worked at the Lonely Dell Ranch on the Paria River just downstream from Lees Ferry. Many Mormon pioneers lived alone in the Southwest, but few farms were as remote as Lonely Dell Ranch.

Under Brigham Young’s leadership, scout Jacob Hamblin identified the only crossing of the Colorado River for 500 miles. He dug the first irrigation ditch and named the area Lonely Dell. John D. Lee had been the ranking militiaman at the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre near Cedar City, Utah, and he started Lees Ferry at the behest of the Mormon Church.

Ten years later, management of the ferry and farm fell to the Johnson family and Warren Johnson built a small log cabin on the site in 1881. Clela Johnson is a descendant of those Mormon pioneers. When I met her at Lonely Dell last year, she wore a light gray, full-length dress and both her and her daughter’s long hair was swept into a bun. Scanning the canyon, looking at the small houses in which her ancestors raised large families, she sighed. She felt, “Awestruck, because you realize the hardships they went through and you’re a part of it.” Her family made a pilgrimage to the farm and she wanted her young daughter and son to know their family history.

Several extended families lived at the site including the Lees, Johnsons, Emmetts, Spencers and LeBarons. By 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, everyone departed. Then, in an interesting twist, the remote farm became a dude ranch, renamed Paradise Canyon Ranch by owners Leo and Hazel Weaver.

In 1935 and 1936, Hopi stone mason Poli Hungavi built a Southwestern style ranch house on the site, complete with tongue-and-groove ponderosa pine floors, wood-beamed ceilings and stuccoed walls. The new lodge had no electricity, but it did have a Steinway piano, Mission oak furniture, Navajo floor rugs and plenty of remote trails for horseback riding. However, the isolation meant few paying guests, especially during the Depression.

By 1939, the Weavers, like the Mormon families before them, moved on. In 1974, after a series of ranch owners, the National Park Service bought the site as part of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, including original buildings, a dugout, pioneer cemetery and vintage equipment.

“The setting is identical to the 1870s,” says Allen Malmquist, an interpreter and preservationist with the Park Service. “This is what they saw.”

Malmquist has worked to restore the Weavers’ Paradise Canyon Ranch House, which has single-pane windows with redwood sashes, covered in four layers of dark green paint. White lead paint is also found on the structure and Malmquist has donned a hazmat suit and used a special sander that traps dust to remove the lead paint.

The Park Service seeks to preserve the site just as it received it, including the 1881 Johnson cabin, the main irrigation ditch, whose lateral canals bring water to the orchard, and various ranch buildings constructed from 1881 to 1936. Now the site is protected as the Lonely Dell Ranch and Lees Ferry National Historic District.

Even though Lees Ferry is the official beginning of the Grand Canyon and the division point for Colorado River water into upper and lower basins, it’s still a lonely place. Walking through the farm and up along the Paria River, visitors feel the dedication of the original Mormon settlers who sought to make the desert bloom. That dedication and community commitment is particularly evident in the 1874-1933 pioneer cemetery where a large Johnson family headstone bears the date 1891.

Ferry service existed at the site for 55 years, and Mormon families operating the ferry helped everyone across who needed assistance. During high water in May 1891, a family who had lost a child to deadly diphtheria came to Lonely Dell, but the parents did not tell Warren and Permelia Johnson of their loss. The Johnsons hosted the travelers in their home until a safe crossing could be made, and the children all played together. Six Johnson siblings became infected with deadly microbes. Folk cures failed and over a seven-week period, the Johnsons painfully watched four of their own children die of diphtheria.

Perhaps that story was on Clela Johnson’s mind when she said to me, “I know the family history and what’s been told.” She shook her head at the numerous gravestones, many in disrepair, and commented, “What a remote location and such hard work crossing the river. So many different people came.”

She looked east at the far canyon wall, the wind slightly ruffling her long gray dress. Beyond the cemetery, rusted farm equipment and trucks sink into sand. In his one-ton truck, Clela Johnson’s father freighted in the center pin for nearby Navajo Bridge that made Lees Ferry obsolete.

As we left the cemetery she turned to me and said, “How did they live on nothing? They had to have that real backwoodsman’s spirit.” I mumbled my agreement and looked around. There were very few trees in sight.

Andrew Gulliford is a professor of Southwest Studies and history at Fort Lewis College.