Before the tunnel, getting to Zion at all was the hard part. Boone tells how Kanab's Dave Rust and a governor's offer of prison labor mended old roads in this corner of Utah, why the next governor wanted no more roads to rocks, and how a park director came around. The tale closes on this same road.
"I build no more roads to rocks!" That's a governor of Utah up out of his chair, banging his desk, and the rocks he meant were Zion. The story goes that Simon Bamberger had been over that road himself and had seen the bills, and here came young Horace Albright of the Park Service, asking him to keep the convict crews at it. You can see his point. Who in the world was ever going to want to come out here? Dave Rust of Kanab had already bet the other way. He went around to the towns and the commercial clubs, hat in hand, until he had eight thousand dollars pledged. Then he went to see the governor before Bamberger, Governor Spry, who made him an offer. Forty men, twenty teams, guards and road engineers thrown in. All the locals had to do was pay for the hay and grain. The men were convicts. That's how a good many roads in this country got mended and straightened, by men who had no say in where they went. Around the time a road first went into Zion Canyon, prisoners were cutting another from La Verkin up to Springdale. I can't give you the name of a single one. Albright took that offer, went off and wired his boss, Stephen Mather, all lit up about what he'd seen. Mather wrote back that Albright must have fallen in with some chamber of commerce men, or been handed some very potent drink, because he'd never heard of any such country. So there's your official opinion. One man says it's rocks. The other says it isn't there. Mather came around, I'll give him that. He backed the park without ever laying eyes on it. He paid to send twenty winners of a Mormon scripture contest to Yellowstone, so folks could see what a park even was. The last man to place a bet is the one I care about. The road under your tires was still being cut when a homesteader named Jack Morrison claimed a hundred sixty acres where it was going to meet Highway eighty-nine. The family story says he lashed a tree to the car so it wouldn't careen off the steep grade. A Model T with a whole tree dragging at its tail, and a man at the wheel betting all he had that somebody, someday, would want to come this way. Friend, that somebody is you.
Photo: NPS Photo · Public domain