Before Capitol Reef was a park, a Torrey storekeeper and bishop kept a museum in his shop and believed its contents could change what people knew about the past. Boone tells how his collection drew the government's attention, and what became of it.
Say you'd walked into the grocery at Torrey around nineteen thirty for nothing but a sack of sugar. You'd have come out hearing about Egypt. The man behind that counter was Ephraim Pectol, a longtime Mormon bishop who helped found this park, and with Charles Lee he'd gathered several hundred objects older than any bishop in this country. Lee was a son of John D. Lee, executed for his part in the Mountain Meadows massacre, and the park figures he collected for the income. You'd have gotten Pectol's reason along with your change. He argued in print that they bore out the Book of Mormon. He wanted what every believer wants and hardly anybody gets, proof you could set on a counter. He'd already taken three shields home out of the rock country, against the law. He called finding them a spiritual experience, and held them three thousand years old, proof of contact with Egypt. How they look I won't tell you, and that's on purpose. In nineteen thirty-two a government geologist came after collections worth over fifty thousand dollars and found them on display. From there the story forks. One telling has an agent seizing the shields and leaving them with Pectol anyway. The other has the bishop turning them over. He was put up for custodian of the monument he'd fought for and never got the job, and he died in nineteen forty-seven. The three thousand years shrank to a few hundred, whichever paper you read. The monument got the shields after he was gone, and three experts hired to name the makers each called it a problem to pin them on one tribe by science. So it went to the law, which lists oral tradition alongside archeology. The federal notice says no site in this park is tied directly to Navajo occupation, and in its next sentence that Navajo oral tradition places Navajo ancestors here before any settler. Both sentences stand. The bishop's grandson respected oral tradition, but in his Western view it "should not be used as the determining factor in a legal case." Leave the old man back of his counter, as sure as anybody ever was. In August of two thousand three, the National Park Service returned the shields to the Navajo Nation.
Photo: NPS · Public domain (U.S. Government work)