William Grandstaff: First Settler, Forgotten, Restored

The first successful non-Native settler in the Moab valley was a man named William Grandstaff, and his story carries a weight that the town has only recently begun to fully acknowledge. Grandstaff was born into slavery. After emancipation he made his way west, working as a cowboy, and in eighteen seventy-seven he arrived at the abandoned Elk Mountain Mission fort on the Colorado River with a French-Canadian trapper known only as Frenchie.

Together they occupied the fort and built a small ranch, growing vegetables and raising cattle and horses on the riverside land the missionaries had cleared two decades before. Grandstaff lived in the Moab valley for four years. As white settlers began arriving in greater numbers in the early eighteen eighties, his welcome wore out.

The circumstances of his departure are murky. Some accounts say he was accused, probably falsely, of selling alcohol to Native Americans, which gave settlers a pretext to pressure him to leave. The racial hostility he faced was real and clearly documented.

He left around eighteen eighty-one, eventually settling in Colorado, where he died in nineteen oh one. The white settlers who forced him out named the canyon adjacent to his former ranch using a racial slur derived from his nickname. That name appeared on official maps for more than a century.

In twenty seventeen, the Board of Geographic Names officially renamed the canyon Grandstaff Canyon, restoring his proper name to a landscape he had been the first non-Native person to farm. The canyon is now one of the most popular hikes near Moab, its walls of Wingate sandstone reflecting afternoon light the color of rust.