For more than 50 years, a man named Waldo Wilcox
guarded a secret treasure on his ranch in eastern Utah: possibly the
greatest single collection of artifacts that belonged to the Fremont
Indian tribe, a people who mysteriously disappeared 700 years ago.
Today, the former Wilcox ranch represents one of the most significant
archaeological treasure troves in North America, but one that now is
imperiled by two simple facts: Waldo Wilcox is no longer standing guard,
and the rest of world knows what is there.
In 1951 Waldo Wilcox purchased 4,200 acres (1,700 ha) of hardscrabble land 130 miles (210 km) southeast of
Salt Lake City---an area that includes Range Creek Canyon---for the
purpose of raising cattle. Shortly thereafter, he and his family
discovered dozens of perfectly preserved Indian encampments and hundreds
of pristine artifacts---precisely the sort of treasures that
archaeologists would seek to investigate and looters would try to steal.
Waldo Wilcox decided to prevent the exploitation and destruction of
these artifacts (a form of
cultural property), as best he could, by actively defending his land against intruders and publicity seekers for more than five decades.
Fewer than 25 years before Wilcox purchased his
ranch, an expedition from Harvard University had traveled through the
same region, uncovering evidence of a theretofore unidentified
Native American tribe. The expedition's leader, Noel Morss, dubbed
these people the Fremont after the Fremont River that supplied water to
the area. In the years between Morss's original identification and
Wilcox's land purchase, precious little evidence was uncovered to
further illuminate how the Fremont lived or why this centuries-old
culture inexplicably vanished some time around the year 1300.
Indeed, there was very little evidence that the Fremont were a people distinct from their better-known contemporaries, the
Anasazi tribe, who also mysteriously disappeared before European
settlers ventured into the American Southwest. Even today, only four
types of artifacts can uniquely be qualified as belonging to the
Fremont: a rod-and-bundle type of basketry that no other Native American
tribe employed; an unusual type of
moccasin fashioned from deer hock; trapezoidal depictions of human beings in personal artifacts,
pictographs, and petroglyphs; and a thin, gray-clay type of pottery.
Of these artifacts, only the pottery is consistently sturdy enough to
survive the harsh southwestern climate. Thus, concentrations of Fremont
artifacts such as those found at Range Creek are of incalculable value.
What makes the Fremont so intriguing---besides their mysterious disappearance---are their attempts at agriculture in the arid
Utah climate. While primarily a
hunter-gatherer people, the Fremont in general and the Range Creek
Fremont in particular sometimes cultivated a unique breed of "dented"
corn that could withstand the rigors of the climate. Moreover, the
Fremont often stored their hard-won corn harvests in heavily defended
granaries atop sheer
cliffs and
mesas. Range Creek boasts several well-preserved Fremont granaries,
some in nearly inaccessible nooks within the rocks, offering a glimpse
into the Fremont's precarious life as embattled farmers, desperately
working to protect their winter stores against rivals by hiding their
harvests within natural geographic defenses.
Ignorance of the Range Creek Fremont encampments
protected the artifacts for years, and for much of their known existence
Waldo Wilcox stood guard, keeping the vast majority of the Range Creek
archaeological cornucopia intact until his recent sale of the land to a
charitable trust. In summer 2004, the state of Utah (which now holds the
title to the Wilcox ranch) finally opened select portions of Range
Creek to the press, displaying the quiet and fragile secrets that
survive thanks to Waldo Wilcox's lifelong vigil. While the subsequent
publicity has drawn increased attention from looters, scientists now at
least have a fighting chance to preserve and record the Range Creek
finds before, as happened with the Fremont tribe itself, they succumb to
the forces of history.
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