Pioneer Voices of Zion Canyon

Eileen N. Smith-Cavros

7˝ x 9˝, 98 pp.
30 historic and contemporary photos
Cloth $14.95
978-0-91563-043-1
Utah

“A truly authentic sense of place can only be gained when one has lived in a place long enough to shed a lifetime’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears upon it – to have lived through its round of seasons, known the nuances of its morning winds and evening breezes, eaten from its soil and from the flesh of the animals that ate its plants.” – from the introduction by Lyman Hafen

A compilation of oral histories assembled for the Pioneer Voices of Zion Canyon Project in 2004, this book features the words and stories of second and third generation pioneers of the greater Zion National Park area. The Pioneer Voices Project aimed to capture a quickly vanishing chapter of the Zion story, and to bridge the gap between the frontier history and the modern times in which we live.

The interviewees lived and worked from the 1910s to the 1930s inside or near what is now Zion National Park, during the years of the conversion from private land to national park. They all had in common the rich comfort of pioneer families and a willingness to work hard to make a life in this breathtakingly beautiful but unremittingly harsh land of floods and droughts. In their own voices they explain what it was like to live in this inspiring place in a time of transition, to struggle with an impassive land, and to share joy, hardship, faith, love, frustration, death, and triumphs while coming of age in a land called Zion.

Eileen M. Smith-Cavros was the founding director of the Zion Canyon Field Institute and is currently an environmental sociologist and assistant professor of sociology at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Distributed for Zion Natural History Association