Even two hundred years after Lewis and Clark, the West remains a very strange place. Take this, for instance: in the '80s, the Utah Department of Transportation was for some time afflicted by a Hopi curse. The construction of I-70 required the destruction of a rock formation and petroglyphs associated with Spider Woman, a Hopi creator deity:
A Hopi religious leader visited the site as the leveling had started, and asked that the ridge be saved because it recorded the Hopi legend of the creation of the world... The ridge was destroyed and hauled away. When the Hopi religious leader returned and saw what happened, he put a curse on UDOT through Spider Woman and her daughter Salt Woman who controls all natural phenomena such as weather. After this curse was invoked on UDOT the major flooding problems of 1983 began. Billies Mountain slid, blocking Highway 50 and a railroad track and flooding Thistle, Utah. The waters of Utah lake rose, covering I-15 near Provo. The Great Salt Lake covered I-80 near Kennecott. The bridges on I-70 over Fish and Shigle Creeks have never completely settled, and some of the workmen said all the concrete poured after the curse seemed to crack in the pattern of a spider web. [Quotation from Spider Woman Rock flyer published by Fremont Indian State Park]
If you haven't visited Fremont Indian State Park, you really should, next time you're on I-70 in Utah. I have been reasonably familiar with the history of the Fremont Culture for some time through my experience as a river guide on the Green and Yampa. But all we see of the Fremont on our trips is rock art and a few granaries, and with so sparse a record on the ground it's too easy to think of them as merely degenerate, hillbilly relatives of the Anasazi. So I was quite delighted when I took refuge from a rainstorm in the Park museum, and found it full of artifacts far in excess of the pot sherds and stone tools I was expecting. Sandals, baskets, figurines; really excellent stone amulets; twine so well preserved you could confuse it with the stuff in your garage; and the characteristic Fremont moccasins made from the skin of a whole deer leg, with the dew hoof incorporated into the heel to provide traction. These are the sort of artifacts which speak not merely of human survival, but of human creativity and personality.
What is more, the cliffs around the visitor center are absolutely teeming with rock art, and the Park's material on rock art interpretation is very interesting. It presents perspectives from both Paiute and Hopi interpreters. My first impulse was to regard such mixing and matching from two very different tribes as rather fast and loose; but on reflection, the approach is fairly coherent. The more naturalistic, representational art, depicting animals and landforms and the like, is approached from the Paiute perspective, whereas the panels which appear more abstract or symbolic are given a Hopi mythological interpretation. The Fremont were almost certainly more akin to the Hopi in their religion and social structure than to the Paiute; and many perplexing panels seem surprisingly comprehensible in the context of Hopi creation myths or ceremonies. On the other hand, the Paiute have an undeniable connection to the Fremont simply by living in the same region: however different their intellectual culture may be, finding food and water and traveling must have been a similar affair for both peoples. Therefore Paiute interpretations of certain panels as maps to water sources, or hunting stories may well be legitimate. The meaning of rock art intended by its creators is almost certainly an archeological unknowable, but I found many of the Park's speculations surprisingly convincing.
