From the house where I grew up, it was a mile or so south to the confluence of the Virgin and Santa Clara Rivers. In the late 1950s, when I first awoke to my existence and began to perceive the world through the chaotic shapes of the surrounding landscape, ours was among the last houses on the south edge of St. George. Broad fields of alfalfa, milo-maize, sugarcane, and dew-glazed pastures dotted with grazing dairy cattle covered the space between our house on 600 South and the river bottoms. I could ride my bike down what is now 700 South to what is now River Road and pedal effortlessly downhill to the old iron trestle bridge that spanned the Virgin and marked the border of my known universe. The Virgin’s confluence with the Santa Clara River was further downstream and less accessible. I only remember going there once as a boy in the truck with my dad.

I recall standing there with my father’s hand on my shoulder and him telling me that this was why our town was there. There would not be a town, could not be a town, if it weren’t for the water that so fortunately flowed through our little valley. And it was there, where these two streams met, that it all began.

The day my dad and I stood at the confluence you could hear nothing but the soft sigh of the merging waters, the chirping of the birds, and the easy rustle of the breeze through the tamarisk. Today, the place where the two streams meet is bordered by a sprawling convention center parking lot and the elevated ramps of an I-15 interchange where hundreds of automobiles zoom by every hour. Hardly any of the occupants of those cars possess an inkling of the significance of the place they are passing. They’re too busy rushing from here to there to realize that this is where the waters spilling off the southern lip of the Great Basin and the waters originating far to the northeast in the high mountains of the Markagunt Plateau join in serene convergence before cutting through a Shinarump anticline and rolling away toward the sea.

There are rocks near this confluence upon which one-thousand-year-old etchings are still visible. They are cryptic messages left by the Ancestral Puebloan and Southern Paiute people, who lived beside the two streams a millennium before my great-great-grandparents arrived here. As a boy, I roamed the nearby Chinle slopes and picked up random shards of their beautifully curved, corrugated, and painted pottery.

Just downstream, where the Virgin River breaks through the Shinarump ridge and flows out from under the freeway bridge north of Bloomington, is another message on a rock high above the stream. This one was etched by a nineteen-year-old boy whose family had settled in the late 1850s near the place where the two streams meet. Who knows how many hours he chipped away at his legacy high on the cliff above the farm where, daylight to dawn, he spent six back-breaking days a week working in the cotton fields. He carved a large profile, presumably of himself: an image of a plant with leaves and flowers and a line of simple words that are potentially visible from the more than twelve million vehicles that zoom across that bridge every year—but certainly not legible at eighty miles per hour:

“I was set her[e] to rais[e] cotton March 1858 JACOB PEART.”

The Peart family and a handful of others living in the area were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They had come to this hot, desolate, and out-of-the-way place at the behest of their spiritual leader, Brigham Young. Their mission was to experiment with the idea of growing cotton. They began to call their new home Utah’s Dixie, though the place where the two streams met had long been called Tonaquint by the Southern Paiute, who had lived there for centuries.

Those first Latter-day Saint settlers at Tonaquint began the displacement of an indigenous way of life that had found a natural rhythm with the landscape over scores of generations. Few of those original farmers stayed, but they blazed the way for a full company of settlers who heeded Brigham Young’s call late in 1861, leaving their verdant farms behind in northern Utah and trekking to the desert of Utah’s Dixie to make a town.

I am haunted by the thought of that boy perched on that cliff above the Virgin River, etching his story in stone. Of Jacob’s message, author and historian Juanita Brooks wrote, “The carvings were evidently not done in one sitting or in two, but must have been the occupation of a lonely nineteen-year-old boy through several Sunday afternoons.”

Jacob Peart must have felt a compelling desire to make his mark and leave something to be remembered by. In our age of fleeting digital messages that come and go at the speed of light—in front of our eyes one moment and dissolved in the ether the next—it is heartening and somehow comforting that the message Jacob etched in stone more than 160 years ago can still be witnessed on that cliff above Bloomington, can still be pondered and considered for what it means: a reminder of a time when it took days to create a simple piece of content and a time when that content said something worth remembering a century and a half later.

We live in a time when it can seem important to post a photo of our gourmet meal on social media. Jacob Peart lived in a time when all he wished to share was the fact that he was there. And all the time he was chipping away at his message on the cliff, he was praying that there would be something to eat on the table when he returned home.

Note:

The logo for Lyman Hafen’s NOT FORGOTTEN podcast incorporates a facsimile of Jacob Peart’s cotton plant etched on the cliff above Bloomington. “It is a fitting symbol,” Hafen said, “of the epic stories of this community, stories that, just like Jacob Peart, cannot and should not be forgotten.”