The Great Hunt

by Kay Koppedrayer

You can call it the graffiti of the ancient world, only the artists were better and they had more to say. What I am referring to is the rock art of ancient times. Virtually every place humans have lived carries traces of their work drawn with earth pigment on cliffs, in caves, or cut directly into the rock facing itself.

Of other places, of other times–we perhaps think of rock art as belonging to a world far from our own. However, to find glorious and compelling rock art, you don't even have to leave this continent. Ample examples exist in both the United States and Canada, with certain regions in the American West abounding with petroglyphs. There are places where hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of petroglyphs can be found. Take, for example, Nine Mile Canyon in Utah, a place well worth any effort it takes to get there.

Sometimes described as the world's longest art gallery, Nine Mile Canyon is about an hour and a half southeast of Salt Lake City, roughly midway between Interstates 70 and 80. One of the easiest ways to get to the area is to take Utah State Highway 6 south from Price. A little distance out of town, you'll find Soldier Creek Road. A marker indicates Nine Mile Canyon. Turn north onto Soldier Creek Road and follow it until the blacktop runs out, maybe thirty miles. From there, you're on a gravel road in a landscape as rugged as you'll find anywhere. Canyons, cliffs, and badlands make up the terrain lying between the Price River bottomlands and the Uintah Basin.

Guidebooks recommend that you come fully prepared when you enter these canyon lands. The road you follow through Nine Mile Canyon was first constructed in 1886 by the Buffalo Soldiers, a regiment of African Americans of the 9th Cavalry. Plenty of water, a full tank of gas, and five good tires are a must, one brochure advises. In the fall when the weather is still nice, you can travel for a day scarcely meeting anyone, except for the tankers rumbling through the canyons. Today the gravel road services not only the back country traveler, but also large industrial trucks, tankers, and drill rigs.

Rich underground deposits of natural gas draw this traffic. Large wells are now a fixture of this landscape, as is the industrial traffic that plies the canyons' roads. The clouds of dust that signal the tankers' movements worry many archaeologists. The heavy vibrations of the trucks, the dust, and even the application of magnesium chloride to keep the dust down threaten to damage what is found on the canyon walls.

Though seemingly forbidding lands, these canyons offered shelter and sustenance to people long before European explorers arrived. Over several millennia successive groups of people lived here, leaving various traces of their existence. Stone tools, implements fashioned from horn and bone, village sites, granaries, and other evidence of human activity testify to their presence. Perhaps the most striking evidence of human habitation is the many hundreds of petroglyphs produced some thousand years ago. Abraded into the sandstone faces of the canyons are animal and human figures, along with a range of lines, dots, spirals, circles, and other symbolic expressions. In some instances the petroglyphs offer narratives of hunting; in other cases they suggest birth, the abundance of life, or the passage of time. Others express meanings we can only guess at from the distance of time and space that separate us from the people who left these compositions on the canyon walls.

Little is known about these people, apart from what they left behind. Archaeologists call them the Fremont, after the name of the American military officer who led an expedition in the 1840s to survey parts of the West. By the time John Fremont arrived, the people who now carry his name were long gone. Early groups, perhaps even one of the first, around 700 CE made the canyons in what is now south central Utah their home. Hunting and gathering, as well as the cultivation of corn and other crops, sustained them. Their knowledge of the terrain and the animals in it must have been formidable, as shown in the rock art they left behind. The petroglyphs document their precise knowledge of animal behavior and more. These expressions in stone speak of their awareness of how human life depends upon an understanding of the cycles of the surrounding world and the wildlife within it.

Much of what the petroglyphs communicate, however, is a matter of speculation. By approximately 1250 CE, the Fremont had moved on. To where is not entirely clear. Perhaps they left due to climate change. Or, under the influence of other native groups moving into the region, their cultural patterns changed. Perhaps they were forced out or absorbed into the life ways of these newer migrants. What happened is an enigma, just like any full understanding of the petroglyphs they left behind. The meaning is there, but because we can't always see it, we continue to puzzle over their rock art.

Many, many compositions are easily seen on the sandstone walls of the canyon. Though called Nine Mile, the canyon is actually over seventy miles long. It was not a mistake in distance that gave it its name; rather, Nine Mile refers to the transect used by the cartographer who mapped the region during John Wesley Powell's explorations in 1869. Following the waterway now called Nine Mile Creek, the canyon forms a natural conduit to the Uintah basin.

Nine Mile Creek is not the only waterway in the area. There are any number of other creeks that meet Nine Mile Creek. Dry for most months of the year, these creek beds are surrounded by the tributary canyons that join Nine Mile Canyon. Where they meet are important entry ways, intersections, and places of betwixt and between, places marked with petroglyphs. The area is a virtual labyrinth of natural conduits leading from one place to another. At these junctures, some of the most significant rock art sites are located.

The petroglyph that scholars have labeled "The Great Hunt" is found in one such place. Located at milepost 45.9 on the gravel road, the site is near where Nine Mile and Cottonwood Canyons converge. A powerful place, the living art that marks this site expresses something known in every hunter's heart. A successful hunt depends upon knowledge of the seasons and of the animals who offer sustenance. The animals are big horn sheep, likely Ovis canadensis nelsoni, who ranged in these canyons up until the early 1900s. They were hunted in various ways by the Fremont peoples and by the Utes, Paiutes, and others who later occupied this region.

Archaeological evidence as well as accounts of the later native groups living in the region document well-developed hunting skills. Working together, hunters constructed pitfalls and enclosures into which they lured or drove the sheep. They used fire to startle the sheep, sometimes running them over cliff edges. Lone hunters stalked sheep at salt licks. Other hunting techniques involved coordinated group tactics. To distract the sheep, one man might wear a ram's head and horns, even its entire skin, while another in wolf skin mimicked the movements of a predator. With their bows and arrows ready, the other hunters watched, waiting for the right moment to come in for a clean kill. All of these techniques involved the ability to predict the behavior of the bighorn sheep.

"The Great Hunt" petroglyph reveals just how much the Fremont peoples knew about these animals. Ray T. Matheny, Where Cottonwood Canyon meets Nine Mile Canyon 14 Thomas S. Smith, and Deanne G. Matheny, research scholars who have studied the rock art in this region in Utah, point out that the depictions in this work are far from generic. The artist (or artists) provided an abundance of careful detail. The work shows a gathering of big horn sheep. Rams, ewes, lambs, and yearlings are all depicted. Rams make up the top row, below are ewes accompanied by their young. To the side, several human figures with bows fitted with arrows are shown. With arrow ready, the large hunter furthest right appears to be kneeling. His knees are bent. Is he stalking game? Or is he offering a prayer? Or something else? Is this a vision, or is it the narrative of a real event? We don't know. He seems to be wearing a headdress, perhaps including a single feather. The other hunters are in closer. They may well be working together to bring some meat home for the community. They also have headdresses, as does a more roughly incised figure just adjacent to them. He, however, is unarmed.

Apart from the sheep and the hunters, there are other figures. Up in the middle of the line of rams at the top of the piece is a figure with a horned headdress. What this figure represents is anyone's speculation. Maybe another hunter, a shaman, or the spirit of the sheep that needed to be acknowledged before any successful hunt. Or, the figure is a bighorn ram, seen headon, rather than in profile. The figure is connected at the feet to both rams and ewes. An undulating line that connects to the adjacent rams also touches the tail of a ewe below. Elsewhere among the sheep are shield figures. Perhaps they are part of the hunting party, eliciting the innate curiosity of the sheep to draw them closer. If so, the shields may provide protection if a ram suddenly charged. Here, however, the sheep do not appear to be alarmed by the hunters, except perhaps the ram on the far right. His head is raised, as if attentive and alert.

There are other important details. Matheny and his colleagues point out that the difference in size between the rams and ewes is in correct proportion. Rams weigh often twice as much as ewes and four times as much as lambs. Size is one way the sexes are differentiated, but that is not all. The artist (or artists) took care to include several other important characteristics. As is typical in the Fremont petroglyphs, the sheep are portrayed in profile, however, the horns on the ewes are both shorter and straighter, whereas the rams' horns are not only thicker and longer, but also curl. In fact, the one ram among the ewes is shown with horns in full curl. Another is below in what appears to be a prone posture, perhaps indicating a successful hunt or something else.

The backs of the ewes are more rounded and those of the rams are straighter. Also noteworthy is the way the sheep face the same direction which, as Matheny and his colleagues observe, accurately captures how sheep often move in single file with dominant animals leading. In the top row following to the left from the horned figure, the rams are portrayed in descending size. This depiction reflects the ordering of rams when they move in their natural environment. Likewise the ewes are shown in close kin relations. All except one is trailed by a single lamb, again reflecting their natural state. Among these bighorn sheep, the birth of twins is rare. That only one ewe is shown with the two lambs observes that fact. Another possibility is that this ewe's second lamb is an orphan drawn into the fold, as sometimes happens. Likewise, the medium-size sheep are yearlings still under the care of the ewes.

Significantly, this petroglyph shows rams, ewes, and young together, something that happens only at certain junctures of the year. Most of the time ewes and rams forage separately, with the choice of habitat dependent upon the seasons. Ewes seek ledges when birthing, moving into more level areas with better foraging as summer progresses and the lambs grow. In the winter, they again seek cliff cover where the snow pack is shallower and thus easier on the lambs and yearlings. Uninvolved in care for the young, rams have wider foraging opportunities, moving into open areas more readily. The only time that all the sheep range together is in fall or early winter, during or just before the rut.

The scene, however, does not document the violence of the rut when rams clash. No butting of heads is shown nor competition for ewes in estrus. Instead, the sheep appear to be moving, as happens in late fall migration. Here, the site of this petroglyph is telling. It is located just a short distance from the mouth of Cottonwood Canyon where it joins Nine Mile Canyon. This is a major travel corridor leading from the mountains and high plateaus of the south to where winter forage would be in abundance in Nine Mile Canyon. Located here, "The Great Hunt" petroglyph would seem to be a record of an annual event. As Matheny and his colleagues put it, the panel likely memorializes "the annual, predictable interception of bighorn sheep" at this juncture.

Not hidden in a cave or another inaccessible place, this scene is readily visible to anyone who passes this way. An expression of hope, an offering to guarantee the abundance of game, a record of the cyclical replenishment of animal life, a document of actual hunts—all these meanings and more are possibly expressed in this panel.

Today we humans obtain most of our calories directly or indirectly from agriculture. Wheat, rice, and potatoes are staples in our diet, balanced with domesticated fruits, vegetables, and animal protein that is nowadays more often than not grain-fed. Our very lives rely on agriculture. Without someone out there tilling a field, most of us would starve. But that wasn't always the case. In our long history, we survived by hunting, gathering, and fishing long before we farmed. And even when we learned how to till the land and care for crops, we still needed the protein animals provided. The Fremont peoples knew how to grow corn and other crops, but as "The Great Hunt" petroglyph shows, they were also thankful for what the hunt could provide.