At an elevation of 6,000 feet, Cove Fort, Utah, is a zone of physical and cultural transitions, a land of extremes.1 In the summer, daytime temperatures can soar over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit before plummeting at nightfall. A frost visits every month of the year. Winters are especially harsh. It is not uncommon for temperatures to register twenty, even thirty, degrees below zero. The wind blows constantly, pausing only at sunset, leaving the air breathless and suspended.2 There is water, but it is locked deep underground, reachable only by machine-drilled wells. Any surface water comes from snow melt that trickles down mountain draws and canyons from the east. By mid-May, sometimes early April, these sources run dry. Like much of the Great Basin, Cove Fort country is affected by eastward moving Pacific storm systems. The Sierra Nevada trap most of the moisture from these systems; the north–south running mountain ranges that fold and ripple across the Great Basin catch what is left.3 The grasslands and meadows that initially attracted Mormon herdsmen exist in delicate balance, reliant upon this seasonal flow. Overgrazing attracts sagebrush and cedar, which suck away the runoff and choke future germination and growth.4 Situated on the west side of Highway 91, Cove Fort stands apart, like a sentinel over the small valley entrusted to its care. The fort's thick rock walls are rooted to the land as if they were some hardened, volcanic outcrop. Giant black locusts tower over them, their branches reaching like fingers to the sky, pitching and swaying in a rhythm all their own.Since the mid-1990s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has operated Cove Fort as a church historic site where visitors encounter a narrative that emphasizes the faith and sacrifice of Mormon pioneers in settling and colonizing a difficult land. They learn that in 1867 Brigham Young called Ira N. Hinckley to be in charge of the construction of what became officially known as Cove Creek Ranch Fort, or Cove Fort. The fort was to be part of a larger network of such structures built in response to Utah's Black Hawk War. Two years earlier, an altercation between Mormons and Ute tribal leaders in the town of Manti plunged the region into a series of violent, internecine conflicts. A formal peace treaty was not reached until early 1868, and it ultimately resulted in the removal of the Ute peoples onto reservation lands far to the northeast. The history recounted at Cove Fort pointedly emphasizes that although the fort was constructed for defensive purposes, it was never attacked. Instead, Hinckley and members of his family lived and operated it as a ranch and way station from 1868 until the early 1880s, when the newly completed Utah Central Railroad significantly reduced overland traffic and lessened the need for a formal way station in the area. By 1890, church website material relates, the Hinckleys had left Cove Fort for good and the church leased the land to others.5Historic site interpretation is admittedly challenging. Remembering and forgetting occur simultaneously as one historical narrative replaces or suppresses another, creating what the anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously termed the “silences of the past.”6 Understandably, the church's acquisition of Cove Fort, its restoration, and ultimate interpretive strategy most likely stem from the fact that Ira N. Hinckley was grandfather to the then-president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gordon B. Hinckley. As a result of these choices, Cove Fort's historic significance is unfortunately obscured. Little mention is made of the family members who helped build the fort or, more notably, the site's difficult history, constructed as it was during one of the West's most significant yet little researched or understood Native-settler conflicts. Moreover, this narrow interpretive strategy ignores Cove Fort's later history as both a home for the William Henry and Otto Kesler families and as a stopover for countless automobilists traveling along Highway 91. Indeed, Cove Fort existed as a base for the Kesler family's expanding ranching operations and as a minor tourist attraction far longer than it did under the care of Hinkley or anyone else.It is Cove Fort's twentieth-century history as a ranch and service station that I relate here. In doing so, I contextualize this history within existing literature on tourism in the West and explore how the Keslers creatively managed the land while capitalizing on the fort's distinctive heritage and its location along Highway 91, one of Utah's busiest thoroughfares before the coming of the interstate. The Keslers’ management of Cove Fort speaks to the way in which tourist destinations impacted everyday life on the periphery. Locals like the Keslers adapted to and even benefited from changing times. They also fought to maintain a sense of autonomy, a way of life and understanding of the past that shaped their identity and relationship to the land. As Hal Rothman observed, places have identities: “Human-shaped places, cities and national parks, marinas and farms, closely guard their identities. Their people are located within them in ways that create not only national, regional, and local affiliation but also a powerful sense of self and place in the world.”7 In a sense, the Kesler family's historic ties to Cove Fort is Rothman's thesis in microcosm. For most of Cove Fort's history, the Keslers called it home. They lived in the fort and worked the land to make it productive for livestock, developing an intense connection with the place that remains to this day. It was only when others threatened to remove the Keslers from Cove Fort that the family worked to make the site more accessible to passing travelers, finally turning the fort into a museum in the early 1960s. As the gatekeepers to Cove Fort's history, the Kesler family's experiences illustrate the politics of preservation: what gets preserved and why, along with how historical narratives are created and shaped.In relating this narrative, I rely extensively on oral history. Larry Porter first interviewed Otto Kesler in 1964 while researching his master's thesis, the only scholarship on Cove Fort currently available. It is clear from these interviews that Porter hoped Kesler could tell him more about Cove Fort's early history, original layout, and outbuildings. Kesler did this and more. Fortunately, Porter provided the Kesler family with a recorded copy of this interview, which I obtained and then transcribed. Porter's interview is priceless, and I make liberal use of it here. It captures Kesler's rare ability to call a history into existence through the rhythm and artistry of his words. More recently, I sat down with Otto's grandson, LeGrande Kesler Davies, and conducted additional interviews. Davies grew up at Cove Fort in the 1950s and early 1960s during a crucial time when the family nearly lost the fort to the state of Utah. Like those of his grandfather, Davies's stories communicate a deep love for the fort, its history, and the land.8In this case, not only does oral history represent an important source material when written or other documentary evidence is lacking, it also allows readers to hear about Cove Fort from the primary guardians of that memory, Otto Kesler and LeGrande Davies. As Alessandro Portelli wrote, “Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did.” Oral history, Portelli emphasized, “tells us less about events than about their meaning.”9 Through the Kesler and Davies interviews, Cove Fort emerges as a physical metanarrative, situating the family within nineteenth-century Mormon colonization traditions that saw settlement in terms of covenant, beautification, and redemption. For analytical purposes, I have organized my source material into five sections that follow a rough chronological framework of the Kesler family's history at Cove Fort: arrival, early tourist activity, Otto Kesler and ranch life at Cove Fort, renovation, and the transfer of Cove Fort ownership back to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Larry Porter began his interview with Otto Kesler by asking about the arrival of Otto's father, William Henry Kesler, to Cove Fort in 1903. Several important themes emerge from Kesler's retelling of this history: first, by the early 1900s, Cove Fort was in near ruin and that without the arrival of the Keslers, it certainly would have only deteriorated further; second, while William Henry Kesler saw Cove Fort as a home for his family, he was aware early on of the site's significance and hoped to preserve its history. Incidentally, these themes were also present in my interview with LeGrande Davies, suggesting a significant correlation between the two versions. Davies contributed further detail to the William Henry story, most of which he likely learned from his grandfather, Otto Kesler. This additional information speaks to William Henry's inventiveness and ability to create a life for his family at Cove Fort. Finally, Otto recalled a Native American presence at Cove Fort that persisted through the twentieth century. The Kesler family's interactions with Native Americans seem to have occurred in a quiet, almost subtle way. Yet as will be discussed in greater detail later, tropes from the mythic Old West undoubtedly influenced how visitors stopping for gasoline and a quick tour experienced Cove Fort's history.Otto Kesler explained to Porter that after the Hinckleys moved away from Cove Fort, the church leased the fort to a number of individuals. A fire caused by one of the tenants destroyed Cove Fort's north side, leaving the fort unoccupied and virtually unlivable. Previous tenants and campers had used the surviving south side to stable horses and cows.10 “You can imagine what a place, how it goes when nobody's lived around there for two or three years,” Otto observed in the interview.11 It was in these conditions—a charred, broken wreck—that William Henry Kesler found Cove Fort in June 1903. Kesler and some other men from Beaver, Utah, stayed briefly at the fort that summer on their way to Kimberly, Utah, where they had a contract to cut and deliver cord wood for mines. Born in Saint Thomas, Nevada, to Joseph and Anne Pitts Kesler in 1868, William Henry was a month shy of his thirty-sixth birthday. As Davies observed in his interview, William Henry's life had not been an easy one. Kesler married his first wife, Annie Edwards, in 1893. She died nine months later, shortly after giving birth to their first child. He married again in 1894 to Sarah Adeline Losee. Babies came quickly and, by 1903, their family had grown to include four children.12 William Henry led a hardscrabble life, picking up work where he could find it.13 He undoubtedly saw Cove Fort and the surrounding land as an opportunity to at last settle and create a stable life for himself and his growing family.Once the contract with the Kimberly mines was completed, William Henry made a trip to Salt Lake City to inquire about leasing Cove Fort from the church in December 1903. Successful in this endeavor, Kesler spent the early spring of 1904 making the fort habitable. On April 25, 1904, shortly after Sarah had given birth to their fifth child, the Keslers moved from their home in Beaver to Cove Fort. Nine-year-old Otto remembered the day well. He and his younger brother Ferrell rode horses and pushed cows. William Henry drove a wagon loaded with furniture and supplies. When the young family crested Pine Creek Hill, they paused momentarily in the afternoon sun as William Henry pointed out Cove Fort, far off in the distance. “It seemed like it took us a long while to get from the top of that hill over that draw with those slow cows.”14According to Otto Kesler, when the family first arrived, some alfalfa still grew sporadically in the fields east of Cove Fort, across the wagon road. William Henry replanted this field in alfalfa or “young Lucerne,” restoring it to “hay ground.” Otto clarified, “On the west side [of Cove Fort], he got that back into hay again. . . . But the first he got into hay was on the east side of the road—the twelve acres on the east side.” William Henry also planted apple trees, English currants, and gooseberries.15 The Keslers made ready use of Cove Fort's existing outbuildings and structures. The original round corral served the family well into the 1930s; the barn remained in use until the state widened Highway 91 in the early 1940s.16 Otto indicated that plans for the widened road ran near where the barn sat, necessitating its removal. By that time, however, the barn was too old to be of much use. “It'd leak so much . . . and the timber's getting old and that, it was getting kind of dangerous—these big winds, it was pretty hard on it.”17 Otto remembered the barn's four windows nestled high under each gable, a perfect vantage point from which to see the small valley in its entirety. “You could look east and you'd look north and west and south.”18 During this time the fort also became a switchboard for the first telephone line between Beaver and the rest of Millard County. For power, William Henry rigged a direct current wind generator on Cove Fort's south wall. The Keslers also used a gasoline generator until 1941, when the family dug and installed power poles and connected their own line with Telluride Power Company to the east in Richfield.19William Henry Kesler continued to lease Cove Fort until 1911, when he convinced the church to sell it to him outright. He paid $8,500 for it and eight hundred surrounding acres but did not obtain a clear title until 1919.20 Initially the family lived in the fort's south side until 1917, when Kesler was able to hire brothers Martin Henry Hanson and Lorenzo (Ren) Hanson from Fillmore to help him rebuild the burned-out north side.21 Otto emphasized, My father had [the north side] rebuilt . . . because he always said that . . . there'd be a time coming when that fort would be worth more than the whole ranch because he wanted to restore it and maintain it so's it would stand for generations to come for people to see. He knew that there'd been nearly a hundred forts built in the territory of Utah . . . and they were about diminished and destroyed by that time. . . . So that is one reason for him to build the north side up just like it was and to maintain it and take care of it like he did.22For at least the first few years, it appears the family all lived at Cove Fort year round. Birth information suggests that between 1907 and 1911, three of William Henry and Sarah Adeline's eleven children were born at Cove Fort. The remaining children were born either in Kanosh or Fillmore.23 Oral history testimony from Otto Kesler bears this out. Otto notes that William Henry hired a teacher for his children during the wintertime. This continued until Otto was in the seventh grade, when he attended school in Beaver, eventually graduating from Murdoch Academy.24 According to LeGrande Davies, Otto also attended some primary grades in Kanosh, staying with families there during the week and then riding home to Cove Fort on Friday night. William Henry Kesler eventually purchased a home in Fillmore and at least for part of the year mother and children lived there.25The land produced well as long as the Keslers could get water to it and the growing season cooperated. My interview with LeGrande Davies highlights William Henry Kesler's ingenuity and creativity. William Henry rerouted Cove Creek and created irrigation ditches by using a bowl of water as a leveler. He walked slowly and carefully over the land, gaging the grade by how the water tilted and lapped at the bowl's edge. The ditches he cut curved like snakes, but with them the family was able to irrigate between 180 to 360 acres, generally alfalfa. Kesler also diverted some of the water from Cove Creek so that it ran through the fort's east gate via a pipe with a filter box full of sand, gravel, and charcoal. The water then collected into a cistern dug into the center of the courtyard. He kept the water fresh by adding lime and by periodically scouring the cistern. Drinking water, however, came from a seep spring about a mile-and-a-half east of the fort. Water from the spring had to be hauled by wagon in barrels until the 1930s, when the family installed old steam piping from the mines in Kimberly to bring potable water into the fort.26 This proved to be only a partial solution, however, as the pipe often froze. Finally, around 1960 the Keslers improved a well, dug in the 1930s east of the fort, and installed a submersible pump and plastic pipes, buried deep underground to prevent freezing.27The Keslers were also conscious of the local Native American population and their connection to Cove Fort. Otto remembered that bands often traveled through the area and camped near the fort. “They used to get these elderberries . . . in the fall here and get the juice out of them.” Other times bands passed through on their way to Indian Peaks to gather pine nuts. “The Cedar Indians used to come over to Kanosh and they had big celebrations. . . . And that's how we'd get to see quite a few of them there at the crossroads.” Although Otto stated that his parents generously provided these travelers with food and feed for their livestock, the Indians scared him. “I had heard so many stories about them, you know.” Despite his fears, he was obviously curious and observed their camps closely, watching as band members cooked rabbit meat in a traditional way and baked bread using skillets. One frequent traveler through the area was a Pahvant man known as Hunkup. Hunkup was well known to the white community; every once in a while, a newspaper article mentioned his activities, often describing him in disparaging and racialized terms.28 Full of youthful bravado, Otto once approached Hunkup while he was camping at Cove Fort. “He had his little fire and getting his dinner and I says to him, I felt pretty big, I says to him, ‘Hunkup, you used to be pretty mean to the white men, didn't you? You Indians.’ ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘lad, you don't know what you're talking about.’ He says, ‘White man used to be pretty bad [to] Indian, too.’ So that started me to thinking that maybe the white men was about as bad as they was.”29Although Hunkup successfully challenged Otto's assumptions in a way he never forgot, for modern readers, this story may contain troubling elements. In retelling the incident, Otto only conceded that Euro-American settlers were “about as bad” as Native Americans. More may be at play here, however. In one short retelling, Kesler ably communicated the long and difficult relationship that formed between Mormon pioneer settlers and the Indigenous people of central Utah. The memory these interactions left on both peoples is palpably present in this experience. Earlier in his narrative, Otto remarked that he feared Indians because of the stories he had heard about them. He did not elaborate on the kind or nature of these stories. Were these popular stories about the mythic Old West or ones about the Black Hawk War passed on to him from trusted adults? As Paul Reeve observed, messaging from church leaders cast neighboring Paiute bands within enduring Book of Mormon narratives. As Lamanites, the thinking went, Paiutes were members of the House of Israel, who needed reclaiming. At the same time, some believed Paiutes descended from the Book of Mormon group the Gadianton Robbers, making them a feared and dangerous people. Yet even during the Black Hawk War, military action was sometimes offset by overtures of peace. As Reeve explained, by the century's end, power dynamics undeniably favored Mormon settlers. Yet at the same time, the Paiutes had become integrated into Mormon frontier life in ways that insured a significant degree of familiarity between the two peoples, something Otto Kesler's exchange with Hunkup bears out.30 Otto's relationship with Paiutes continued into adulthood, when he both employed them at Cove Fort and purchased their handmade deerskin gloves to sell in his store.By the 1920s, a heightened interest existed nationwide in relating and preserving the frontier experiences of white, northern European pioneer settlers. The historian John Bodnar attributed this awareness to revolutionary social changes that transpired during the first decades of the twentieth century. People adapted to these changes by creating a historical narrative that established and strengthened a cohesive community identity. “The heroes of their cultural construction were not signers of the Declaration of Independence but ordinary people. They were the ‘pioneers’ who first settled the prairie.” Across the Midwest, for instance, Old Settler Associations formed, sponsoring picnics and other events designed to commemorate those who came before. Bodnar explained that these societies glorified Euro-American pioneers as “nation builders, conservators of tradition, and models of survival during difficult times.” Moreover, the conquered land itself became an important physical witness to the pioneers’ hardy ingenuity and resolve.31 In Utah this drive manifested itself in the founding of the Daughters and Sons of Utah Pioneers, organized in 1925 and 1928 respectively. These groups set out to gather histories and otherwise memorialize events and places significant to the Mormon pioneer experience.32Further afield, automobile clubs and other local boosters lobbied for better roads in the hopes of building Utah's nascent tourism industry. They dubbed the highway that passed in front of Cove Fort the “Arrowhead Trail,” one of several main routes to southern Utah's splendors.33 This phenomenon was not unique to Utah. By the early twentieth century, an emerging automobile culture accompanied by a growth in leisure time largely replaced elaborate railroad tours and exclusive wilderness retreats for the wealthy. Targeted boosterism established the West as the nation's playground in the form of national parks and resort towns. History, or at least the mythic variety, became a selling point, celebrating Euro-American conquest in starkly racialized terms.34 Knott's Berry Farm, for instance, originated as a berry stand during the 1930s where Cordelia Knott treated travelers to her famous chicken dinners as a way to make extra money. In 1940, her husband Walter purchased the Mojave Desert ghost town of Calico and resituated it in Buena Park. A decade or so later the new “mining town” had evolved into a a 40-acre Old West theme park.35Not unlike Walter Knott, although on a much lesser scale, William Henry Kesler also capitalized on automobile traffic and promoted Cove Fort as a historic site. Although it is not known when these efforts began, an October 1916 Salt Lake Tribune article alerted travelers that they could find a “telephone, gas and oil” at the fort. The short blurb continued, “Note—This is one of the pioneer monuments of Utah, built by Brigham Young as a protection against the Indians. It is worthwhile to stop and examine.”36 Frank Beckwith, owner of the Millard County Chronicle and an important booster for the area, took an interest in the region's local history.37 In an article for the Improvement Era, Beckwith recalled dropping in at Cove Fort for a drink and hearing about the fort's history, presumably from William Henry's wife, Sarah. “What a fine, wholesome, quiet air the old place had!” he recalled. “There was a wash on the line within, a peep of which I had through the open doorway, lending it a really homey background. And better yet . . . two innocent little lambs, just learning the use of those wobbly legs of theirs, emerged timidly through the big portal.” Beckwith learned the fort had been built in 1867 under the direction of Ira N. Hinckley as a protection against Indians but was never attacked. “I listened with interest to her recital that the place was used for years as a stage station in the long ago; also that boy riders carried mail from Beaver to Fillmore, stopping there for change of mount.” Beckwith added, “To linger was a pleasure.”38The family initially pumped gas from fifty-gallon barrels, which they hauled from the railroad station at Black Rock. Eventually they installed an underground tank and hand pump along with a makeshift concession stand next to the fort. (Later, Otto Kesler operated a store and Texaco service station across from Cove Fort on the east side of Highway 91.)39 People who needed to spend the night at Cove Fort simply pulled their automobiles into the courtyard. The Keslers partitioned the original assembly room (on the south side) into a kitchen and dining area and reserved a few rooms for travelers. William Henry later constructed additional small cabins east of the fort to accommodate more travelers.40 The family also helped automobilists and others stranded on the road running through Cove Fort country. In an oral history interview, Otto shared several harrowing experiences. “I remember one time, they brought a man and two boys in there. Their ears just a-black ends. They had frost sticking out on them.” Instead of bringing the family in by the stoves to get warm, the Keslers gave them a snow bath. “They put snow on their ears, and put their feet in snow and their hands and everything. Rubbed snow all over their faces and gosh, the frost just come out of their ears.”41Located along a major highway, Cove Fort quickly attracted the attention of preservationists. There is evidence that as early as 1921 citizen groups tried to persuade the legislature to designate the fort as a state park.42 Efforts to these ends intensified after F. B. McCombe purchased Cove Fort from the Keslers in 1926. Originally from Oklahoma, McCombe and his son had grand designs to turn Cove Fort into a dude ranch, replete with a swimming pool and interior dance floor.43 It is not clear why William Henry Kesler sold the fort, but some found McCombe's crass commercialism offensive. “The old ever gives way to the new,” Beckwith cynically observed in his 1927 Improvement Era article: “Cherished landmarks of any region, one by one, are replaced or changed by the onward march of progress—and not always by way of betterment.” He went on to elaborate, Historic “Old Cove Fort” is now a “Dude Ranch!” Alongside those ancient walls is now a gas station, a hideous thing of galvanized iron, and stalls to display wares for the camper. Nailed upon the very stones (that but for them would breathe a spirit of deepest sentiment) are now gaudy road signs, screeching with raucous voice a message to the autoist. A huge sign tells you it is a “Camping Station.” But, you have to hunt, in neglect, in weathered paint growing dim, to find the words which bring into being every fondest remembrance of the place—Old Cove Fort.44In order to both preserve Cove Fort's history and create a tourist destination, civic groups and highway boosters erected a monument commemorating the Black Hawk War and the fort's sixtieth anniversary in April 1927. W. O. Cluff of the Richfield Commercial Club presided over the dedication festivities, which included remarks by Heber J. Grant, then president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Ira N. Hinckley's sons, Bryant, Edwin, and Arza. Despite the fact that the fort had never known armed conflict, locals treated the gathered crowd to a “sham battle for the possession of the fort, executed between a group of cowboys representing the Indians and attacking the fort, and the Richfield battery defending it.”45 A few months later, however, the McCombs left Cove Fort, leasing it to J. M. Perkins and W. R. Monroe, both of whom were involved in Sulphur, Utah, mining. Perkins and Monroe planned to continue running Cove Fort as a resort, but by January 1929, they, too, left and the Keslers repossessed the fort.46When William Henry Kesler reacquired Cove Fort, he set out to establish it as a historic site, most likely playing to increased automobile traffic and commercial club interest in selling southern Utah as a tourist destination. He spent time locating artifacts and memorabilia visitors might find interesting—guns predating the Civil War and an impressive saddle and coin collection.47 He constructed a small outbuilding near Cove Fort to house these curiosities, calling it “the museum.” He also purchased a Studebaker borax wagon from Death Valley and parked it in the fort's courtyard.48 Kesler made his most significant find in 1930 when Ira Edward McMullin, an LDS bishop in Leeds, Utah, contacted him with an enticing offer. The Leeds congregation was in the process of constructing a new meetinghouse and wanted to replace its bell. McMullin had learned that a local hardware dealer had recently sold Cove Fort such a bell. Would William Henry trade his new bell for the old one? A load of fruit would be thrown in to cement the deal—after all, the Leeds Ward bell was not just any bell. According to tradition, it had served as the dinner bell for federal troops (Johnston's Army) who came to the territory as part of the Utah War. In 1861, when Union Army Colonel Patrick Connor arrived in Utah, he took the bell and cannon from Camp Floyd and installed them at Camp Douglas (later Fort Douglas). Sometime in 1877, a few daring Mormons made off with both bell and cannon. Concealed in a load of grain, the bell found its way to the Leeds meetinghouse. With a reported provenance like that, William Henry could hardly resist, and the dinner bell has been in the Kesler family's possession ever since.49In 1934, shortly after Kesler acquired the famed bell, the Utah Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association was the last organization to encourage the establishment of a state park at Cove Fort.50 The Daughters of Utah Pioneer