Bluff Fort: Building Something Permanent in Hard Country
Near Bluff, Utah
The people who arrived at Bluff in the spring of eighteen eighty were exhausted, had buried some of their company along the way, and had worn out much of their livestock crossing country that had no road. What they found at the San Juan River was not a paradise but a place to start over. They built quickly, because the alternative was worse.
Leaders Silas S. Smith and the Danish pioneer Jens Nielson organized construction of Bluff Fort, a compound of log cabins arranged in a protective square with a church, a school, and a cooperative store in the center. The San Juan River ran nearby, providing water, but it was also unpredictable, flooding in spring with enough force to wash away the fields planted in the bottomland and to undercut the banks where cabins stood.
The red sandstone bluffs that gave the settlement its name towered above on both sides of the valley, beautiful and enclosing at once. Bluff proved to be one of the most difficult settlements in Utah's history. Repeated floods destroyed fields.
The soil in parts of the valley was too alkaline for crops. Relations with Navajo families to the south and Ute families to the north were often uneasy, and livestock disappeared regularly into the canyon country. Population declined from the original two hundred thirty or so to about seventy people by nineteen thirty.
Other colonies that Bluff helped spawn grew larger and more stable, including Verdure, Monticello, and Blanding. Bluff itself did not grow so much as persist, held in place by families who had paid too high a price to leave.
