The Legend People Turned to Stone

Long before mapmakers named this place Bryce, the Southern Paiute looked at these hoodoos and saw faces. They called the formations Anka ku wass a wits, which means the red painted faces. And they told a story to explain them.

In the old days, the Paiute said, this land was home to the Legend People. They were birds and animals and lizards and other creatures, but they had the power to make themselves look like people, and they walked and lived the way people do. For reasons the story leaves shadowed, the Legend People became bad and did something that was not good.

So Coyote, the powerful and unpredictable spirit of many Western tribes, turned them all to stone, freezing them exactly where they stood. Look closely, the Paiute say, and you can still make them out. Some stand in long rows.

Some sit. Some seem to hold onto one another. Their faces are still there, still painted red, just as they were the moment they were changed.

This version was carried into the written record in the nineteen thirties, when a Paiute elder remembered by the park as Indian Dick told it to a park naturalist. An excerpt from that telling stands in the park to this day, so that visitors meet the hoodoos first through the eyes of the people who knew them longest.