Sunset, Arizona: The Mormon Ghost Town on the Little Colorado

In the spring of eighteen seventy-six, a company of Mormon pioneers dispatched by Brigham Young rode south through Lee's Ferry and staked out a settlement they called Sunset, on the banks of the Little Colorado River. They were among the first Anglo farmers to homestead this stretch of high desert, and they threw up a cottonwood stockade for protection while they dug irrigation canals from the river.

For a few years Sunset worked. They planted crops, ran cattle, and named the place with characteristic frontier optimism.

Then the desert pushed back. Floods repeatedly blew out the dams. By the late eighteen eighties Sunset was empty. Today the only thing left is a quiet cemetery inside Homolovi State Park, just north of Winslow, where the settlers buried their dead on a bluff above the river they never quite tamed. The park carries a Hopi name, Homolovi, meaning place of the little hills, and it opened in nineteen eighty-six. It protects more than three hundred archaeological sites, including seven pueblos built between about twelve sixty and fourteen hundred by the ancestors of the Hopi. The largest, Homolovi Two, held about twelve hundred rooms and some forty kivas. Sunset was founded by the Mormon leader Lot Smith, and three of his children rest in that cemetery.