Jacob Hamblin, the Buckskin Missionary, and Fort Kanab

The story of Kanab's Mormon settlement begins with a man named Jacob Hamblin, who was known throughout the Southwest as the Buckskin Missionary. Hamblin was unlike most frontier evangelists. He believed in peaceful negotiation rather than confrontation, traveled extensively through Navajo and Paiute country, learned enough of both languages to communicate without interpreters, and built relationships with tribal leaders that helped prevent the kind of violent conflict that consumed other sections of the frontier West.

Hamblin worked in the Kanab area in the eighteen sixties, building alliances with the Southern Paiute and Navajo peoples whose territories bordered the Utah settlements. He found the valley strategically important and recommended it for further colonization. A fort was built on the east bank of Kanab Creek in eighteen sixty-four, but the early settlement was abandoned during the upheaval of the Black Hawk War years.

The permanent settlement came in eighteen seventy, when Mormon families arrived to establish a community here. The name Kanab comes from the Southern Paiute language, where it means place of the willows, a reference to the willow trees that grow along the creek banks in the valley. Some Paiute families joined the early settlement, living within the fort and helping to farm the land in exchange for food, an imperfect arrangement that reflected the complex relationships between Mormon settlers and Native peoples across the region.