Newsletter Summer 2007

Historic Painting of Zion Comes Home
By Lyman Hafen, Executive Director

A multi-talented man named Frederick S. Dellenbaugh visited Zion Canyon in the summer of 1903.  It was a trip he had wanted to make for 30 years.  As a young man fresh out of school, he had accompanied John Wesley Powell on his second expedition of the Colorado River in the early 1870s, and had followed the legendary explorer around the Colorado Plateau as a topographer and chart maker.  From several angles he had seen the great temples of Zion Canyon looming on the horizon.  But the opportunity for a closer look did not present itself.  For three decades he dreamed of coming back to explore the canyon whose mystery had exerted a tight grip on his imagination.  During that three-decade interim Dellenbaugh traveled in Europe and trained as an artist.  When he finally returned to southern Utah in 1903, he was well prepared to write about it, photograph it, and paint it.
            Dellenbaugh came by horse-drawn covered wagon.  He was welcomed by Bishop O. D. Gifford in Springdale, and invited to camp on his property near where the post office sits today.  Dellenbaugh made a multi-day foray into the canyon, taking photographs and making notes that would end up in the January, 1904 edition of Scribner’s Magazine.  His article, entitled, “A New Valley of Wonders,” filled 17 pages in what was at the time one of the most popular periodicals in America.  It would have been something like a Travel Channel feature on TV today.  For the first time, multitudes of Americans were introduced to what Dellenbaugh called “a wondrous expanse of magnificent precipices.”  The man had been thoroughly seduced by Zion.  He reached deep into his bounteous store of vocabulary to express his awe.  “To the eye prejudiced by the soft blues and grays of a familiar Eastern United States or European district,” he wrote, “this immense prodigality of color is startling, perhaps painful; it seems to the inflexible mind unwarranted, immodest, as if Nature had stripped and posed nude, unblushing before humanity.”
            Indeed, it was the colors of Zion Canyon that caused Dellenbaugh’s heart, and rhetoric, to soar.  Unfortunately, except through his florid prose, color was the only thing he could not reproduce in his Scribner’s article.  Magazines of the day were printed in black and white.  So while his photos documented the towering majesty of Zion, they could not convey the canyon’s “immense prodigality of color.”  For that, Dellenbaugh turned to his canvas and oil paints.
            For years I have known that Frederick Dellenbaugh produced a series of oil paintings of Zion Canyon during his visit in 1903.  But until this past May, I had never seen one of them.  He completed the paintings in time to exhibit them in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.  I knew of the paintings because I had read the story of David Hirschi, a Rockville boy who served a mission for the LDS Church just after the turn of the century, and happened through St. Louis on his way home to southern Utah.  While in St. Louis, Elder Hirschi took in the World’s Fair and was delighted to discover a Utah pavilion where paintings of his backyard were on display.  As he entered the exhibition he was taken aback by the incredulity of the people viewing the paintings.  It seems the folks were quite suspicious of this Dellenbaugh chap.  They thought he was trying to pull a fast one on them.  They could not believe a place so resplendently magnificent, so plastered with color, existed on earth.  These were people who saw the world in black and white, through the pages of periodicals like Scribner’s.  They were “prejudiced by the soft blues and grays” of the East and of Europe.  They did not believe what they were seeing.
            Young Hirschi went about the exhibit trying, one-on-one, to convince the fair goers that Dellenbaughs’s images were in fact almost exact representations of a place he knew well.  Finally, the boy who had spent the last two years proselyting in Europe, got up on a soap box and called the gathering to attention.  He told them there was, in fact, a place called Zion Canyon, a landscape of unmatched beauty.  He assured them that Mr. Dellenbaugh’s paintings were true representations of that place.  To anyone who doubted him, he lifted his shoe and pointed to its buckskin laces.  “I made the laces in this shoe from a deer I shot on that hill,” he said, and he pointed to the spot in one of the paintings.
            Dellenbaugh’s Scribner’s article, and his oil paintings in the 1904 World’s Fair, played an important role in the process that led to President Taft’s designation of Zion Canyon as Mukuntuweap National Monument in 1909.
            In May of this year Superintendent Jock Whitworth of Zion National Park received a phone call alerting him to the fact that a 1903 painting of Zion by Frederick Dellenbaugh was to be sold at auction in a matter of days in Tennessee.  The park curator, Leslie Courtright, went right to work.  Within days, working with Zion Natural History Association, the newly formed Zion National Park Foundation, and the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Foundation, the money was raised to make a competitive bid on the painting.  Within ten days the painting belonged to Zion National Park and is now on display in its Human History Museum.
            I stood before that painting just the other day, a relic that has hung on somebody’s wall or languished in a Tennessee attic for more than a century, and marveled at how it is now back home in Zion Canyon.  It is a true, almost photo-like depiction of the mouth of Zion Canyon from the perspective of about where Bishop Gifford’s property would have been.  As I looked deeper into the painting and sank fully into its world, I was sure I could see the exact spot where David Hirschi shot his deer.

ZNHA and Park Service personnel at the unveiling of the historic Dellenbaugh painting in Zion National Park, May 19, 2007. Left to right: J.L. Crawford, emeritus board member; Ron Terry, ZNP Chief of Interpretation; Joann Hinman, Director of Operations; Paul Roelandt, Superintendent Cedar Breaks NM; Nick Jorgensen, David Mortensen, board members; Jock Whitworth, Superintendent ZNP; David Clove, board member; Leslie Courtright, Curator ZNP; John Palmer, board chairman; Joe Sharp, board member; Lyman Hafen, Executive Director; Roland Lee, board member; Therese Feinauer, store manager; Michael Plyler, ZCFI Director; Pam Hilton, Jim Lemmon, Curt Walker, board members; Tracy Jones, Operations Specialist.