Dead Horse Point: A Legend About Thirst and a Terrible View
Near Moab, Utah
The mesa that juts out above the Colorado River northwest of Moab carries one of the most evocative names in the American Southwest, and the story behind it is genuinely grim. Dead Horse Point takes its name from a cowboy legend about wild horses and a fence left in the wrong place. In the late eighteen hundreds, the narrow neck of land connecting the mesa to the surrounding plateau, only about thirty yards wide, made the flat top a natural corral.
Cowboys drove wild mustang herds onto the mesa, fenced off the neck, and sorted through the horses, keeping the ones worth breaking and releasing the rest. According to the most widely repeated version, one group of horses turned loose could not find its way back through or around the fence. Unable to reach the Colorado River two thousand feet below, the horses died of thirst on the mesa top within sight of the glittering water.
The name Dead Horse Point recorded that grim outcome, and no one ever changed it. The view from the mesa is one of the most dramatic in the American West. The Colorado River bends far below in a curve that fills the canyon, and the mesas and spires of Canyonlands spread to the south in an almost theatrical arrangement.
Utah opened the mesa to visitors as Dead Horse Point State Park in nineteen fifty-nine. It has since appeared in multiple films and television productions, including Mission Impossible Two, Thelma and Louise, and Westworld. The horses are long gone.
The name of the place keeps them present.
