Travel Secrets by V

Come relive a late 1800s old pioneer town at Fort Bluff, Utah. Including cabins, a school, church, meeting house, blacksmith shop and a lot of really cool wagons. Furthermore, you can actually sit and climb in the wagons to get a real feel of what it would have been like back then. Not to mention that you can also step inside an authentic Ute Tepee and Navajo Hogan. In order to see what living in one feels like, both have been furnished for your viewing pleasure. On top of that, Fort Bluff has the oldest pioneer-built structure in San Juan County, the Barton cabin. Best of all, all the cabins are decorated differently with artifacts from that era.

No one expected to settle here

Fort Bluff was established in 1880 after a team of Mormon pioneers who were trying to make their way to Montezuma Creek failed.  All in all, two hundred and fifty men, women and children set out to start the San Juan Mission in an area that was known as a refuge for lawless men. With this in mind, in December of 1878, they started to make their way across southwestern Utah. In the hopes that they would get there faster, they decided to take a route advised by a previous scouting party, called the “Escalante short cut”. However, they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. Because the treacherous terrain in the “short-cut” actually ended up extending their journey instead of shortening it. In the end, what was expected to be a six-week journey, turned into a six-month ordeal.

Why did it take them so long?

Incedently most of the sections of the trail weren’t wide enough for a carriage. So men had to chisel and blast a way down through a one thousand two hundred foot drop in the Hole in the Rock cliffs until they finally made it to the river below.

Establishing Fort Bluff

Even though their destination was Montezuma Creek, located about twenty miles upstream, when the pioneers finally made it down the cliff, they were too exhausted to continue. Since the river provided a steady source of water for farming, they began building cabins and an irrigation ditch. In all honesty, no one really knows how many cabins they built. But it was somewhere between thirty-eight to sixty-three. Out of those, only one remains intact, which is the Barton cabin. All the others have been beautifully recreated.

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