Best Time Keeper
Waldo Wilcox knew there was trouble the moment he saw the mauled(受伤的)deer carcass, not far from one of the meadows where his cattle grazed. His dogs, Dink and Shortie, sensed it too—mountain lion. He grabbed his pistol and a rope from his truck, and said, "let’s get him". Then he headed up the mountainside, his hounds racing far ahead.
Wilcox moved in long strides up the rocky grade. Still, it took some time before he topped the summit. The big cat was not 50 yards in front of him, its fangs(尖牙)bared, cornered by the dogs on a massive sandstone bluff.
Wilcox gripped his gun. He hoped to take the mountain lion alive and sell it to a zoo. He’d done that before and made a tidy profit. Wilcox took quick aim, his pistol cracked, and there was a sudden silence as the animal fell limp to the ground.
It wasn’t until the red dust had settled and Wilcox’s pulse had slowed that he gazed around. What he saw stunned him. High on the bluff lay an archeological(考古学的)treasure trove(珍藏物)—large pieces of pottery, stone shelters that once housed whole families, and domed structures that had held wild grains harvested centuries before Europeans set foot in North America.
Wilcox made his discovery on the bluff almost 20 years ago—but it was not the first time he had found relics on his land. Since 1951, when his father bought the high-valley Range Creek ranch, a year had seldom passed in which Wilcox did not come upon some spot of archeological interest. Occasionally he stumbled across burial plots.
Native American Culture
For nearly half a century, he kept quiet about the riches, telling hardly anyone outside his immediate family what was hidden in the isolated valley 160 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. When he discovered a new site, Wilcox would note its location—then just let things be.
Now the secret of Range Creek is finally out. Four years ago, forced by time to give up ranching, Wilcox, 75, sold his beef-cattle property in a deal that ultimately put the land in state hands. Thanks to Wilcox’s silence, the 4 200-acre ranch is one huge, untouched archeological site. Today, scientists from Utah’s Division of State History and the University of Utah are busily cataloguing magnificent, previously unknown ruins on the property.
What the scientists are learning at Range Creek has already begun to shed light on one of the greatest mysteries of Native American history—the fate of the Fremont culture, which had thrived in Utah for almost 1 000 years, then vanished virtually over-night in the 1300s.
The very existence of the Fremont did not come to light until the late 1920s, when a Harvard University expedition discovered evidence of an ancient people who settled along the Fremont River in southern Utah. Farmers and hunter-gatherers who arrived in the region at about A. D. 400, the Fremont lived in one-room homes dug into the earth and finished off with stacked-stone walls and roofs made of reeds and mud. Carbon dating of corncobs found on the Wilcox ranch hinted that Range Creek was buzzing with activity from roughly A. D. 900 to 1100.
But right around the beginning of the 14th century, some great shift occurred. The drawings, pottery and structures particular to the Fremont culture ceased to be made—anywhere. Some experts guess that other peoples pushed Out the Fremont. Others speculate that some climatic event forced the Fremont to move south, where they may have integrated with other tribes.
A Living Monument
"In terms of history and archeological study, Range Creek is essential to the state," explains former governor Olene S. Walker. "It gives us a view into a period for which we have no written history." She is speaking primarily about the Fremont culture, but A World That Time Forgot. Even today, the valley resembles a world that time forgot.
When Wilcox was 11, visiting Range Creek with his dad, he and a friend guided their horses up the valley, and began exploring the rocky hillsides. When he discovered a man-made dome of stone and clay, he wasn’t entirely sure what it was.
Decades later, probably alerted by a hunter whom Wilcox had allowed on his land, a university archeologist contacted Wilcox, asking if researchers could take a look at the ruins he heard were plentiful in the valley. Wilcox was wary but allowed the group onto his property, leading them to a stone wall. "Then one of them gets out a pick," he recalls, "and raises his arm like he’s about to chip off a piece of the rock. I grabbed that pick out of his hand, showed the fellows to the gate, locked it behind them and said goodbye. I still got that pick somewhere."
Even as he approached 70, Wilcox continued to run cattle, tending to his herd on horseback. Finally, his aching body, as well as his worried wife and four grown children, told him it was time to retire.
"I hated the idea of leaving, but there comes a time when you have to give it up," says Wilcox, a muscular six-footer who now lives in Green River, three hours by car from Range Creek. He accepted $ 2.5 million from the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, a national conservation group, in a deal that ultimately deeded the property to the state—which, he hoped, was more likely than an individual to preserve the ruins.
Sadly, southeast Utah is riddled with sites that have been looted. While Wilcox presided over the valley, Wilcox lived contentedly among the undisturbed remains of an ancient civilization. Today, hc sometimes laments having sold the ranch, in part because even tiny Green River feels crowded to him, but mostly because back in the hills he had a sacred kind of calling: to protect his land and its relics. It wasn’t easy keeping them secret all those years, but it was well worth it.
"If I had to do it all over again," he contends, "I’d do the same. "
Also about Wilcox, who is a kind of living monument to America’s pioneer era. He spent decades in a valley practically cut off from the rest of civilization. He’s not a worldly man, nor a man of many words. Living as he did, surrounded by soaring mountains, he rarely had visitors and never owned a television or subscribed to a newspaper. Because his wife moved with their children to the nearest town during school months, he spent much of each winter alone, leaving the valley only a few times each year for provisions.
Still, it was hard for Wilcox to give up the land he loved so much. He is even slightly suspicious of the archeologists now scouring his property, referring to them as "those college fellows with their degrees". He possesses the kind of wisdom and humor that can be nurtured only by years of herding cattle over an 8500foot pass, sinking a well to draw water from—to carve a living out of a wilderness.
Wilcox has been on a first-name basis with nature all his life. Both his grandfathers had migrated west in the 1800s, one working on the railroad, the other raising cattle. His father, Ray Budge Wilcox, owned a ranch southeast of Range Creek and taught his two sons how to ride, shoot and drive cattle almost as soon as they could walk.
Waldo was about 20 when Budge told him that Range Creek was for sale and he was thinking of buying it. He’d put up the money but invited his boys to sign on as partners. Waldo was delighted. "It’s some of the prettiest land you’ve ever seen," he claims. Wilcox’s father had occasionally sold the relics found in his land since 1951.