In the summer of 1925 a dusty road filled with cars, a governor and a rodeo, all because one school principal saw something his neighbors didn't. Boone tells how the party went, and what came after it.
You've never seen dust till you've seen five hundred cars try to get to one party down one dirt road. That was July of nineteen twenty-five, and the man who'd brought it on was Joseph Hickman, thirty-seven years old, a high school principal lately sent to the legislature. His neighbors looked at this slickrock and saw a hard place to live, and travelers, as one old sketch has it, "a bad place to lose a cow." Hickman and the Torrey grocer, his brother-in-law Ephraim Pectol, looked at it and saw Wayne Wonderland, and they'd been selling it for four years to anybody who'd stand still. He'd pushed through a bill for a state park board, and folks took that to mean they had a park, the way you would. Saturday there was a rodeo and a dance, and Sunday as many as five hundred cars came on together from Bicknell to Fruita, to a bower built for the shade. There on the platform stood Governor George Dern, telling that crowd how he'd looked over "the natural bridges and the rest of the scenery, including the pretty girls." He called the whole affair a move "to open Wayne Wonderland to the world in advance of its creation as a state park." In advance. His parks board, he'd said, had "not one cent of money to spend." And in all that crowd stood not a single soul from the National Park Service. Everybody went home in high spirits, it seems, Joe Hickman with them. Less than a week later he went up to Fish Lake with friends. Charles Kelly, later the monument's first custodian, wrote that a sudden storm pitched Hickman out of the boat, and he couldn't swim, and he drowned. Kelly wrote one thing more, that three days after the drowning, word came that the government would look at the best of Wayne Wonderland for a national monument, and you should take that the way the park's historian does, as a claim with no other record. The movement lost five years. The state park the old histories say was born that year never officially existed. It took until nineteen thirty-seven to get a monument, dedicated in Grand Wash with Pectol as master of ceremonies, and a natural bridge wearing Hickman's name. I keep seeing that bower the Monday after, the speeches done, the dust come down, the leaves starting to curl, and a schoolman with less than a week left, sure he'd done it.
Photo: NPS · Public domain (U.S. Government work)