Escalante Town: Pioneers, Powell, and a Priest's Name

The town of Escalante sits in a green valley ringed by desert, and its story begins in eighteen seventy five, when settlers from nearby Panguitch crossed the mountains to survey this basin. They laid out the townsite on a tidy grid of twenty acre parcels, the classic Mormon village pattern. While they worked, they met members of one of John Wesley Powell's survey expeditions, and it was one of those men who suggested the town's name.

The settlers returned in eighteen seventy six to break ground on the first homes, and remarkably, many of those sturdy pioneer houses still stand today, making Escalante a rare living museum of frontier building. The name honors Silvestre Velez de Escalante, a Franciscan missionary who in seventeen seventy six, the same year as American independence, traveled through this region searching for an overland route from Santa Fe to the missions of California. His expedition passed near the river that would later carry his name, though he never saw the town that now does.

For its first several decades, Escalante lived on ranching, dairy, logging, and a little mining. Cattle and sheep grazed the surrounding plateaus, and the isolation was profound. This was some of the last country in the lower forty eight to be mapped, and supplies and mail had to travel a long way over the mountains.

That deep isolation shaped a fiercely independent community, one whose descendants still ranch here today.