Cohab Canyon

If you had two wives and a federal marshal on the road, you'd want a better canyon than this one. The way it's told, whenever the marshals rode in, the polygamists went bolting up this canyon, and that's how it got the name. There was something to run from. Congress went after plural marriage in eighteen eighty-two, the manhunts got called cohab hunts, and that decade marshals hauled in more than a thousand Mormon men. In nineteen sixty-three a magazine ran the legend under the title Where Mormons Took Refuge. So you ask who in Fruita had a reason to run, and the park's historian comes back with one name. Calvin Pendleton, who built the Gifford House, down in the nineteen hundred census with two wives, Susannah and Hattie. The next man in that same house, Jorgen Jorgensen, apparently came from a polygamist colony in Mexico. Most folks scratching a living out here couldn't have afforded it. As for the marshals, either they came quite often, the historian figures, or one visit got told a great many times. Then he did what no storyteller ever does. He tried it. He got caught here in a summer cloudburst, went looking for cover, and found there isn't any. The way in from Fruita is a steep switchback in plain view of any lawman. A marshal who'd ridden for days wasn't going home after lunch, so you'd be hiding a good long while, and there's not a smoke stain on these walls. Then the name. Cohab was an outsider's slur, not a word Mormons here were likely to use, and some old-timers remember this as Easter Canyon. The historian's guess is Charles Kelly, the monument's first custodian, who named a good many things around here and had no use for religion. He may have done it just to needle the neighbors. That would be just like him.