A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow
Near Bryce Canyon, Utah
The canyon that draws millions of visitors is named for a man who was mostly annoyed by it. Ebenezer Bryce was a Mormon pioneer, born in Scotland in eighteen thirty, a carpenter and shipwright by training who followed his church west. In the mid eighteen seventies he settled with his family below these cliffs, in the Paria Valley, and set about the hard work of homesteading.
He built a road up to the rim to haul timber, and he ran cattle in the maze of rock below. That maze is the problem in the story people still tell. Chasing stray cattle through a wilderness of spires and dead end gullies, Bryce is said to have grumbled that the amphitheater was, in his words, a hell of a place to lose a cow.
His neighbors began calling the labyrinth simply Bryce's canyon, and the name stuck. Bryce himself did not stay long. By eighteen eighty he had moved his family on to Arizona, chasing better prospects.
But the nickname outlived his departure by generations. When the federal government finally protected the area, it kept his name, and today a rancher who found the place inconvenient is attached forever to one of the most photographed landscapes in the American West.
