PIPE SPRING Cultures at a Crossroads: An Administrative History

The Heatons' Store, Gas Station, and Lunch Stand

The Heatons' little store and gas pump were situated on the south side of the old monument road, directly below the fort and its ponds. [583] The newlyweds ran the service station and store "for about five years," Leonard Heaton told historian Robert Keller in 1991, suggesting he had been given a standard five-year permit to run their business. [584] During this period it was the family's primary source of income. [585] From all accounts, Edna was as involved in running the store as Leonard, making and serving sandwiches and attending to tourists' needs. [586] Gasoline was hauled in from Cedar City in 55-gallon iron barrels. Supplies to stock the store were also bought in Cedar City. Heaton later recalled that the dirt road that passed by the monument had very little travel at first, "maybe one a day on average." [587] Travel slowly increased over time, reaching its peak in 1929, with most visitation occurring during the summer months. From the small number of cars passing by the monument, routinely reported by Heaton, it is hard to imagine that individual traveling motorists could have generated very much income. It would have been the lunchtime stops by the Utah Parks Company's tour buses that provided the Heatons' "bread and butter."

Tourists were not the only people to patronize the little store, however. The Kaibab Paiute from nearby Kaibab Village, few of whom had automobiles to drive to Fredonia or Kanab, also came to the Heatons' store at Pipe Spring to buy groceries and candy. In fact, recent oral interviews with two tribal elders suggest that visits to the store were their earliest and strongest memory related to the monument. Born in 1921 and a little boy at the time the store was at Pipe Spring, Kaibab Paiute elder Warren Mayo remembered the store. Mayo smiled as he spoke of trips to the store he had taken long ago with childhood friends to buy candy, one of whom is another tribal elder, Leta Segmiller. [588] Segmiller, born in 1925, also recalled visiting the Heatons' store as a little girl. In a 1997 interview conducted by ethnographer David E. Ruppert and the author, Segmiller remarked,

...it was just across from the fort they had that gas station and that store there. And my uncle and I used to go down there [in his car].... That was in 1931, when I was about six years old, that he used to take me down there to buy crackers and candy and all those junk food. That's when I knew there was - he used to tell me about it, that there was a fort there, and that the white man built [it] to defend themselves. He used to tell me that. [589]

Segmiller laughed as she spoke of the store. She was asked if she had visited the store very often and replied, "Yeah, we used to go down there all the time, because we could buy things there to eat. They had mostly everything in there, so we wouldn't [have to] go to Fredonia or Kanab." [590] She also recalled,

And they also had that old-fashioned gas pump that used to stand in the front [chuckles]. People used to buy gas there then, you know, 'cause it was so far to Kanab from here, and Fredonia. So that was good when they had that gas there for the cars. You didn't have very many cars. You know, very few people owned cars around here then. [591]

Segmiller was asked if she ever went inside the fort when she was a little girl and, if so, did she remember anything displayed? She replied:

Well, he had the grinding stones, and all those little things that go with it. And I think the reason why the [Indian] kids didn't go there was because he had skull in there - you know, an old skull that used to sit in the window. And I went in there with my uncle twice, because he said I needed to see what was in there, when I'd keep asking him about the water. And he showed me where the water was coming from, that was flowing out [of the spring]. And I would never go back in there myself, because there was a skull sitting in there. You know the Indian people are not supposed to associate with old skulls — you know, Indian children, when we were little. And I used to be scared of that, and I thought maybe I'd have nightmares, if we, you know, continued all the time to go down there.

.... Oh, they didn't want us to go there, because they said that the white man took the skull out of the ground, or robbed the Indian out of his head. You know, stories like that, so we would [not] go in there.... There were displays, you know, along the wall of the fort, and you could see all the things like old bowls. I always wondered what happened to those Indian bowls they had in there. [592]

Segmiller wasn't the only one who remembered seeing the skull in the fort as a child. In the mid-1970s, when she was middle-aged, Segmiller worked briefly at Pipe Spring demonstrating traditional Paiute crafts. She was hired by the Park Service to do so, along with another Kaibab Paiute woman, Elva Drye. Drye too was haunted by childhood memories of the skull in the fort window, according to Segmiller:

....when me and Elva were working there, we went up there and Elva [was] talking about that skull [laughs], you know, [about] how scared she used to be. She said, 'I don't want to go in there, because there's a skull sitting in the window.' So we went up there, and it wasn't in there then. They must [have moved it] because when Mr. Tracy — she was asking Mr. Tracy about the skull. He said he didn't know where it went to. They were like that. [593]

Segmiller was referring to Superintendent Bernard Tracy, who oversaw the monument in the 1970s.