Sunset, Arizona: The Mormon Settlement That Could Not Hold

Four miles northwest of Winslow, near a crossing of the Little Colorado River, a group of Latter-day Saint settlers arrived in eighteen seventy-six under the direction of a man named Lot Smith. They called the place Sunset and set about building dams and irrigation ditches to make the desert bloom. The land refused.

The soil turned out to be sandy and salt-laced, hospitable to early frosts, and the Little Colorado's flash floods destroyed the irrigation works repeatedly. Drought killed the crops. Smallpox swept through the community.

Apache raids forced residents to shelter in a nearby fort. By the late eighteen eighties the settlement was abandoned. The wagon route that the Army had mapped through Sunset Crossing in the eighteen fifties would eventually evolve into the alignment that became Route sixty-six.

The Sunset Cemetery survives today inside Homolovi State Park, a quiet acre of headstones from a community that gave out in eleven years.