Wyoming History in the First Person: Death in Death Canyon and Other Horse Stories: That Summer in Death Canyon, Third Day

Sometime around 1900 three young cowboys sat their horses pondering the big mess they had gotten themselves into. Coming over the mountains from Idaho, they had dropped down into the head of a gently sloping valley and followed a gurgling creek several miles, expecting it to lead them into Jackson Hole.

Sure enough, the Jackson Hole valley suddenly opened up ahead, but too close. The creek dropped abruptly into a steep canyon and was foaming over and around big, dangerously jumbled boulders as it raced precipitously down to a lake 2,000 feet below.

Looking down from Death Canyon

to Phelps Lake and Jackson Hole

(Donaldson Miele)

The young men were in deep trouble. Jackson Hole was only a short distance away, but a big chunk of excess altitude intervened. And they had eleven pack horses strung out behind them.

Where the three cowboys decided to take

14 horses down the canyon.

(Donaldson Miele)

They could try to pick their way down; or they could turn back into the mountains and search other canyons for a safer route.

They made the wrong choice. When they rode into the town of Jackson a few days later they had left behind the carcasses of most of their horses and a newly coined name: Death Canyon.

Other versions of the story

At least, that was the explanation for the canyon's name at the time I was posted there as a Grand Teton National Park back country patrol ranger in 1959. Other versions have been proposed.

Death Canyon could be the English translation of an older Indian name. In his autobiography, White Indian Boy: My Life Among the Shoshones (pub. 1910), Nicholas Wilson recounts a story his adoptive Indian mother told of losing two sons to an avalanche in "Death's Canyon."

But Wilson makes no explicit connection between their deaths and the place name. Much later he lived in Jackson Hole. At the time he wrote his memoirs he would already have known the canyon by its modern name.

I understand the official Park Service story now is that a party of pioneers tried to cross from Jackson Hole into Idaho on foot during the winter of 1849-50. One of them didn't make it.

Given the rugged topography of the canyon, and the ferocity of Wyoming winters, and the single fatality, perhaps Survival Canyon would have been a more appropriate name.

The Death Canyon Ranger Station was built by the Civilian Conservation Corp

in 1935, as a barn. Because of WWII, the planned patrol cabin was never built,

so the barn was converted in 1945. It is now listed on the National

(NPS)

Park Service horses

Years before I moved into the ranger station in 1959, a trail had been dynamited into the north face of Death Canyon. But the canyon still posed dangers for horses.

I first rode up to the Death Canyon Ranger Station on King, a big (17 hands) handsome half-Morgan, solid black except for a star and stockings. He was a willing worker with a friendly disposition. Wearing my Smokey Bear hat and ranger shirt, I looked both official and handsome on his back, I thought.

I hoped I’d be riding King all summer. But he was suspect. According to rumor, he preferred going up hill rather than down. His right foreleg seemed tender. So he might not be trustworthy on mountain trails.

I had been told to try him out. If I reported him unsound he would be exchanged for another horse.

Our horses were supplied by a rancher who held a Park Service concession. He and his family and wranglers were authorized to occupy ranch buildings near Jenny Lake and take summer visitors on trail rides.

Every spring he trucked in a supply of horses from his home ranch in Idaho. The Park Service, not being in the ranching business itself, leased from him whatever horses it needed for the season.

The contractor gave park managers first pick but not always good choices. Rangers had to make do with horses intended for the dude string.

Sandy trains his rider

Sandy was the horse I packed with. Unlike King, Sandy did not have a good attitude. Usually ridden by tourists, he was accustomed to easy days of strolling from here to there and back, nose to tail with other horses he knew well, while mostly ignoring whoever happened to be in the saddle and holding the reins.

When I didn't need Sandy he was corralled at White Grass Ranger Station, where The Idiot was stationed (see First Day). Using Sandy as his saddle horse, he patrolled some mostly flat trails along the base of the Grand Teton range.

The Idiot once explained that initially Sandy had been a willful and frustrating mount. But they soon came to an understanding.

When they set out in the morning he just pointed Sandy down the intended trail and slacked the reins. Sandy would amble and graze, taking life easy, until the time came to end the patrol. (That decision, I gathered, was sometimes made by the rider, sometimes by the horse.) Then Sandy would hurry home to his corral and oats.

The Idiot prided himself on having worked out a sensible compromise with his mount. I admired Sandy for his teaching skills.

The Death Canyon Trail is not for the faint of heart.

(Ron Caron)

Tangled on the trail

The morning after I packed my summer supplies into the Death Canyon Ranger Station; that is, the morning after Sandy instigated a runaway with the mare who was also carrying a load (see Second Day); my mind wandered as I headed King and the little pack string back down the canyon—a place with an earned reputation as a horse killer.

I should have been paying attention. Suddenly everything was wrong. The packhorses were beside me rather than following behind. I was looking uphill instead of down.

We had stopped side by side facing in different directions, three horses wide on a one-horse trail.

Then I understood. King, his suspect foreleg tender from the previous day’s work, decided he'd rather go uphill. Noticing me woolgathering, he took the opportunity to turn back. And he picked a narrow spot in the trail to do it.

Fortunately all three horses, even Sandy, recognized the situation was dire. King froze. The packhorses, rolling their eyes at the abyss looming half a step to their right, skittered to the left against King, then froze too.

I was trapped in the saddle, my left leg jammed by Sandy’s pannier and my right knee pressed against the granite cliff on the other side. Speaking reassuringly while squirming free of my stirrups, I disentangled and slid down between the horses. Eventually I got the three separated, realigned, and headed downhill again.

King goes back to the dude string

King, the magnificent half-Morgan who loved to challenge mountains, would never again conquer the trail into Death Canyon.

My saddle horse for the rest of the summer was Spud, a nondescript little bay, 14 hands, who was sound, a hard worker, and totally devoted. Bullied by other horses at the ranch, Spud seemed content living alone in the mountains with me.

Spud passed an important test on our first patrol, calmly stopping when a bear stepped onto the trail twenty yards ahead of us.

(Teton Science School)

We learned to trust each other, Spud and I. When stopping for lunch on patrols I’d find him a patch of grass, loosen his cinch, and hang his bridle on the saddle horn. Then I'd look for a shady spot by the creek where I would eat and, sometimes, take a twenty-minute snooze. When I woke he would be waiting a few steps away.