Day 13
Native Americans utilized the area for thousands of years. Archaic people, and later ancestral Puebloan, Fremont and Utes searched the arid desert for game animals, wild plant foods and stone for tools and weapons. They also left evidence of their passing on a few pictograph and petroglyph panels. The first white explorers came looking for wealth in the form of minerals. Ranchers found wealth in the grasses for their cattle and sheep. John Wesley Wolfe, a disabled Civil War veteran, and his son, Fred, settled here in the late 1800s. A weathered log cabin, root cellar and a corral remain as evidence of the primitive ranch they operated for more than 20 years. A visit to Wolfe Ranch is a walk into the past. Paleo-Indians lived in the lush canyons leading to the Green and Colorado rivers from about 10,000 to 7,800 BC and might have been the earliest people to see Arches. Although there is no evidence of Paleo-Indian use in the park, their spear points and camps have been found nearby. By 9,000 years ago, the climate here became too warm and dry for many large mammals. They and some of their Paleo-Indian hunters moved to higher habitats. Those who stayed in the canyon country depended more on gathering and traveling. This lifestyle, called Archaic, meant that the people had to live in small groups and travel extensively. Archaeologists have found a few spear points, occasional campsites, and quarries for stone needed to make tools. Barrier Canyon style rock art panels, once attributed to the more recent Fremont culture, are the best evidence of the Archaic hunter-gathers in Arches. By A.D.1, Archaic culture gave way to prehistoric agriculturists called Ancestral Puebloans, previously know as Anasazi and Fremont. Arches National Park was a frontier between these people. To the south, the Park preserves some of the spectacular villages of the Ancestral Puebloans at Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Hovenweep and Navajo. To the north at Dinosaur National Monument and to the west at Capital Reef National Park, Fremont archaelogical sites dominate. Ancestral Puebloan and Fremont cultures were very similar. Only subtle difference in styles of art and technological traits distinguish the two cultures. Both groups supplemented their agricultural economies with food from wild plants and animals, supported large populations in sedentary village life, and made beautiful black on white pottery. Arches National Park was not continuously occupied by these peoples. The landscape was only marginally suitable for the floodwater farming these people practiced. During the thirteenth century, both Ancestral Puebloan and Fremont peoples abandoned the Arches region, drifted southward and were succeeded through historic times by Utes and Paiutes. These people were primarily hunters and gatherers. No one knows who the first European was to penetrate Arches. However in the mid 1800's frontiers were pushed back and solitary mountain men and trappers pursued big game and beaver in remote and hostile territory. Denis Julien, one of those lone explorers, might have been the first european to see Arches. He left his name and the date, June 09, 1844, inscribed on a rock fin in the park. People from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints established outposts in many remote areas of Utah in the late 1800's Among these was Elk Mountain Mission. In 1855 the missionaries, under the impress