PART III - THE MONUMENT'S FIRST TEN YEARS (continued) 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,
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,
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:
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:
Segmiller was referring to Superintendent Bernard Tracy, who oversaw the monument in the 1970s.
pisp/adhi/adhi3g.htm Last Updated: 28-Aug-2006 |