The Fremont People of Range Creek Canyon, Utah by Ellen Sue Turner

June 19, 1999, I accompanied Pierce, John, and Tom on a survey and data-gathering trip to Range Creek Canyon, Utah. Our flight from Love Field, Dallas, to Price, Utah was aboard a Merlin Fairchild turboprop plane. The flight was smooth, fast and comfortable. We cruised at 250 knots/hour at an altitude of 20,000 ft.

Waldo Wilcox met us at the Price airfield. Our destination was Wilcox’s ranch in Range Creek Canyon. We set off in one-ton, four-wheel drive Ford trucks. The last 40 miles of the 63 mile trip took us through Horse Canyon and Little Horse Canyon on a winding one-lane dirt road, over a pass at an elevation of 9,000 feet, and down to the ranch in Range Creek Canyon at an elevation of 5000 feet. The trip was slow and rough, and in wet or snowy weather, it can be extremely hazardous.

Wilcox’s grandfather was born in Wyoming and moved to a plot of land east of the Green River in 1883. When the government enlarged the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation in 1941, the family moved to Range Creek Canyon. In 1951, Wilcox expanded the family holdings to 4200 acres, which include 20 miles of the 50-mile Range Creek Canyon. The ranch is surrounded by 100,000 acres of BLM wilderness land. Wilcox runs about 245 head of cattle on the land and keeps a dozen horses.

The cattle graze in the canyon for part of the year and after calving and branding, they are driven up the narrow dirt road to the grazing land that the family owns above the pass. Many lose their way or are lost in falls off the cliff—it takes skill, risk, and hard work to make the drive each year.

The land in the canyon is irrigated by five wells. Springs and trails are found on the faults and when Wilcox first drilled for a well, he hit water at five feet. He dug the well to 50 feet and reinforced the walls to prevent a cave in.

The natural isolation of Range Creek Canyon has served to protect much of the archaeological evidence of the ancient ones, known as the Fremont people, who once inhabited this canyon. When these peoples appeared in eastern Utah is a moot point, but we know that they lived in many different kinds of settings and were able to adapt to all of them. I doubt that Fremont occupation in this area was ever too intensive – perhaps owing to the high elevation of the region and the consequent short growing season. However, exploiting the marshlands in the canyon, which are lacking on the Colorado Plateau, would be productive

There is evidence of indigenous development in the area since Archaic times but about A.D. 500, the old hunting and gathering bands gave way to a fairly large and relatively sedentary population in the areas where resources were readily available. Where resources were scarce, the Fremont people lived in small, highly mobile kin-based groups, exploiting the resources available. The key to understanding them is variation. Some were settled farmers growing crops of corn, squash and beans along snow-fed steams and mountain ranges, others were nomadic desert hunters and gatherers living on pinon nuts, bulrush seeds and mountain sheep. Still others would shift between these styles, perhaps living at all these sites within a lifetime. Bear, mountain lion, mountain sheep, rabbits, small rodents, lizards, snakes, raccoons, etc. and many kinds of marsh fowl and birds frequent Range Creek Canyon today. Common types of flora we observed were cottonwood, box elder, pinon, spruce, cedar, pine and aspen. choke cherries and sage were plentiful—after an unusually wet spring, the landscape was green and flourishing.

Many of the traits of their partly farming culture were similar to those of the Anasazi farmers to the south, but the Fremont culture is characteristically Utahn – they are identifiable as a distinct culture of small kin-based groups of people varying from sedentary populations in villages to highly mobile groups.. The Anasazi are best known for their complex social organizations, elaborate kivas, and road systems.

The most distinctive feature of the Fremont is their unique rock art style, typified by horned, trapezoidal-bodied anthropomorphs, found everywhere the Fremont people lived. In the strongest Fremont areas such as along the Fremont River, near Vernal, the figures are large and have necklaces, earrings, shields, swords, loin clothes and fancy headdresses. Headgear of feathers and deerskin occur in the archaeological record and pendants of sandstone, turquoise, bone, tooth and shell. Their feet point out to either side and the fingers are splayed. They also developed a stylized way of making spirals, concentric circles and circular motifs. Mountain sheep were very important and subsidiary designs such as snakes, centipedes, insects, animals, tracks and wavy lines and zigzags are typical. Hunting scenes with shamans or bowmen are also common. Pictographs are easier to execute than the carving/scratching technique of petroglyphs. For pigments they used natural colored clays, red and yellow ochre, and charcoal. Yucca fibers or animal hair made good brushes.

Many Fremont figurines, which are rare and unique, were made in human shapes and may have been used in ceremonial rites.. The Pilling figurines, one of the best examples we have of Fremont figurines, were discovered in 1950 by Clarence Pilling in a small side canyon of Range Creek Canyon and are now at the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah. I saw them and all of the figurines are made of unbaked clay with applied clay ornaments and show remarkable skill and artistry. The figurines range in size from four to six inches, and still show evidence of red, buff and black paint. The rock overhang where they were found is typical of the many rockshelters, small caves and niches found within the canyon -- probably convenient for seasonal or intermittant use.

The Wilcox family has surface-collected numerous artifacts over the past 50 years, which are unique artifacts of the Fremont culture. Shown here are examples of Fremont thin-walled gray pottery. This is probably the single most distinguishing non-perishable feature, which ties these people together. Plain gray wide-mouthed jars and narrow-necked jugs with strap handles like this basalt-tempered Sevier gray pot shown here, are common utilitarian forms at Fremont sites. Actually, five different pottery types have been defined on the basis of differences in temper but it appears that many local wares were also produced. The early potters used a coil and scrape technique in their construction with limestone as a temper. Variations in temper and the granular rock or sand added to wet clay to insure even drying and to prevent cracking are what distinguish Fremont pottery from other types. Examples include Ivie Creek black on-white and Snake Valley and Sevier black on gray varieties with geometric design elements similar to those used by Anasazi and other Southwestern groups. The broken pot in figure 89 and shards of many of these varieties of Fremont pottery are found in the Wilcox collection. The fingernail impressions along the rim of the neck are a common decorative technique found in late Prehistoric pottery. Madsen (1989:48) suggests this as one of the few bits of material evidence supporting a connection between The Fremont and later peoples of the area.

Characteristic Fremont metates with small secondary grinding surfaces (thought by some to have been used in conjunction with stone balls found at sites – and thought by others to show a connection to the Mogollon who have similar metates) are commonly found in the canyon in association with the remains of shallow, circular pithouses which, probably, had above ground rock, pole and mud, or brush-hut wind breaks. Winters in the Great Basin can be long and cold. In the 60 years that Wilcox has lived in the canyon, the coldest winter reached 30 below zero.

Remains of collapsed pit houses in small, probably extended family settlements, are found throughout the canyon near the marsh and pond and springs and on terraces up the canyon walls. Some are on rock ledges on hill slopes above the creek flood plain. The ones I saw were always on elevated ground – one was on an elevated rock formation in the middle of the meadow .

Small stick and mud-walled granaries are common in crevices and overhangs high in the walls of the canyon – they are difficult to reach or see by the casual observer. They were probably used to cache seed corn and other resources during periods when valley sites were abandoned. One intact granary from Range Creek Canyon is in the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price. Tiny corn cobs and beans were also found in the collection.

Fremont moccasins are another unique trait. They are very different from the woven yucca sandles of the Anasazi. Some were constructed from the hock of a bison which was accomplished by girdling the leg at two points and then removing the hide as a skin tube. Or, from hide taken in pieces off the forelegs of deer or mountain sheep leg. An interesting addition was dew claws, sewn on the heel portion of the sole as hobnails. The moccasin shown here has a tuff of hair on it. Slide 86 shows a fragment of matting made from cattail or bulrush, which may have been used as a sleeping mat and a tiny example of their classic one rod and bundle basketry – another unique construction style, which was markedly different from the Anasazi or later Ute, Paiute and Shoshone.

Other artifacts found in the Wilcox collection include a wide array of bone needles and stone awls (to use as punches, and in weaving and engraving,), bone and shell beads, arrow points, knives, scrapers and other stone tools made from an interesting variety of cherts, obsidian, pink agate, and what looked like alibate from the Llano Estacado in Texas. One large tool was knapped from sandstone. Elongated corner-notched and small side-notched points are characteristic but too few, too varied and too limited in distribution to make them a distinguishing trait.

Examples of pictographs and petroglyphs from the walls of Range Creek Canyon follow:

The figure in slide 80 is a little different and looks more like Barrier Canyon style.( found in western tributaries of the Green River in eastern and central Utah) -The lack of arms, the narrow body and the straight short legs – there seems to be an arc of white dots or something painted on top of this figure – some Barrier Canyon shamanic figures wear a crown of white dots.. Polly Schafsma [personal communication] says that throughout eastern Utah there are sometimes figures that are hard to place stylistically. She thinks that is because there was continuity between the Fremont and the earlier work or at least the earlier paintings influenced the Fremont.

Calendrical systems – this is always a guess--they could be. I was not there long enough to see if these markings interact with sunlight and shadow in any significant way. Heizer and Hester suggest that similar rock art drawings might represent diversion fences for game drives—but their examples had mountain sheep and shaman or bowmen.

Pictographs. Curvilinear style typified by presence of circles, concentric circles, circle chains, sun disks, curvilinear lines, mountain sheep and snakes and star figures. Curvilinear meander has a vague sort of composition in its tendency to fill an area defined by a single boulder.

Rectilinear style, textile-like fret designs, handprints, outline of a foot, etc.

After 1250 A.D. the Fremont began to disappear in the uneven fashion they appeared and by 1350 practically all of the Fremont population had abandoned the Great

Basin and Colorado Plateau provinces. Climatic conditions favorable to farming seem to have changed about this time forcing groups to rely more on wild food resources. Migration into to the area of Ute, Paiute and Shoshone populations may have displaced them. Different art styles suggest that they were pushed out or died out. The reasons for this total replacement of Fremont artifact types and total disappearance of Fremont patterns over its entire geographic range has not been determined.

REFERENCES

Aikens, C. Melvin and David B. Madsen

1986 Prehistory of the Eastern Area. In, W. D’Azevedo (ed), HANDBOOK OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS, VOLUME 11, GREAT BASIN, pp. 149-160.

Madsen, David B.

1989 EXPLORING THE FREMONT. Utah Museum of Natural History, University of Utah.

Marwitt, John P.

1986 Fremont Cultures. In, W.S’Azevedo (ed), HANDBOOK OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS, VOLUME 11, GREAT BASIN, pp. 161-172.

Schaafsma, Polly

1990 INDIAN ROCK ART OF THE SOUTHWEST. School of American Research, Santa Fe. University of New Mexico press, Albuquerque