At the Edge of Ancient Country: Blanding, Utah

Blanding sits in the mesa country of southeastern Utah, a small town at roughly six thousand one hundred feet above sea level in one of the most archaeologically rich landscapes on the continent. The Four Corners region, where the state lines of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet at the only point in the country where four states share a single corner, lies within easy reach to the south. The land here is canyon country, the red-rock and cedar-mesa terrain of the Colorado Plateau, carved by water and time into buttes and canyons that sheltered human beings for thousands of years before Europeans ever arrived.

The Ancestral Puebloans lived in this landscape for more than a thousand years. They built homes in cliff faces, farmed mesa tops, and created pottery, tools, and sacred ceremonial spaces that survive in remarkable condition today, preserved by the dry desert air. The twin sandstone buttes known as Bears Ears have stood watch over this country through all of it, sacred landmarks for at least five Native nations whose roots in the region run back hundreds of generations.

Blanding itself is a young town by the standards of the landscape around it. Latter-day Saint families arrived in the early nineteen hundreds to carve out lives from dry-land farming and cattle ranching in the high desert. The community grew slowly, then received an unexpected jolt from uranium and oil discoveries that came in the mid-twentieth century. The town also carries difficult history. In nineteen twenty-three, a confrontation here between Ute and Paiute families and county authorities ended in an imprisonment that is sometimes called the last armed conflict between the United States government and Native people in the lower forty-eight states, a claim that historians treat with qualifications but that points to a real and painful episode.

Today Blanding is best known as a base camp for exploring one of the densest concentrations of Ancestral Puebloan sites anywhere in North America, and for its own remarkable museum, where you can step into a restored ceremonial kiva and stand among the largest collection of ancient Pueblo pottery in the Four Corners region.