PIPE SPRING Cultures at a Crossroads: An Administrative History

The Ponds and Fish Culture

In April 1942 Heaton reported cleaning the fort ponds, an arduous job that took one man 8-10 days. He described the process: "shoveling [muck] into a wheelbarrow, wheeling it out up a runway and dumping [it] into the truck.... hauling the muck off and then scraping it out of the truck..." [1248] The ponds were then refilled by the monument's main spring. Heaton wrote that it "took about 50 hours to fill the 2 ponds" with water. It had taken 60 hours in 1933, he recalled. [1249] Heaton attributed the difference to the "new spring uncovered in 1941" at the fort's northeast corner. The custodian calculated this was the fourth time the ponds had been cleaned out since the monument's establishment. The first times were in 1926 and in 1930 (both times with the help of a horse team instead of a truck), and the third time was in 1937 (with the help of CCC labor). [1250] By the time Heaton was finished with the 1942 cleaning, only 10 trout remained in the west pond; several hundred carp were in the east pond, most from 1.5 to 5 inches long. The two largest carp (more than 16 years old) weighed 15 and 17 pounds, Heaton reported. He put those in the meadow pond.

In August 1943 Heaton took four of his sons to pick up trout at the Utah State Fish Hatchery in Panguitch. He got 1,900 rainbow trout, about 3.5 inches long, and planted them in the two fort ponds. [1251] Prior to putting them in the ponds, he screened the pond outlets so the trout could not get out through them. In the spring of 1944, Heaton tried an experiment to reduce the usual fish loss associated with cleanings. He cleaned out the ponds in sections, reporting, "I am only doing part at a time as once I killed all the trout in one pond by cleaning it all out in one day." [1252] During the summer of 1944, Heaton reported, "Caught 2 little Indian boys fishing in the ponds by the fort this evening." [1253] (Apparently, Heaton only allowed this privilege to Park Service officials, like Harry Langley.) In May 1945 the custodian reported a number of fish died of unknown causes. "I am of the opinion that another planting of a 1,000 or 1,300 could be made this year," he later wrote, but there are no reports of the ponds being restocked with trout again until 1963. [1254]