On the Arizona Strip, the high desert between Zion and the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, water is scarce enough that a single reliable spring can shape centuries of history. Pipe Spring sits about fourteen miles west of Fredonia, a short detour off US-89A, and nearly every chapter of its history turns on one question: who gets the water?
Neung’we Tuvip, Homeland of the Kaibab Paiute
Long before it had an English name, this was Neung’we Tuvip, the homeland of the Kaibab Paiute. At the visitor center, a tribal member’s words greet you: “This land is the home of the Kaibab Paiute people. This is the place of our origin. We were brought here by Coyote in a sack.”
The Paiute knew the spring as Matungwa’va. The E’nengweng, the Old Ones, had farmed here before them. The Kaibab Paiute moved with the seasons, gathering seeds, pinyon nuts, and prickly pear, and hunting deer and rabbits. They planted corn, beans, and squash near the springs along the base of the Vermilion Cliffs and always came back to them after hunting and gathering trips. Families slept in brush shelters called kahns, built new each season and layered with juniper bark or rabbit skins for winter.
This was more than a way of surviving. In Paiute belief, plants, animals, rocks, mountains, and water are all intertwined, each with its own life and purpose. A plant is spoken to before it is picked. Water has a spirit and power of its own, and Kaibab people still use it in ceremony and medicine today.
Outsiders Arrive
The first Europeans came through in 1776. Franciscan fathers Francisco Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante passed within eight miles of Pipe Spring on the return leg of their journey from Santa Fe to Utah Lake. The friars likely owed their survival to Paiutes who gave them food and directions around the northern edge of the Grand Canyon.
The Spanish world that followed brought something far darker. A tribal member’s words on a trailside panel recall how the slave trade reached this country: women and children “were carted off to slave markets.” Ute and Navajo slave raiders followed, and the Paiute made a painful choice to move away from the water to protect their families.
U.S. military campaigns added to the upheaval. Kit Carson was driving the Navajo from their homelands, and displaced Navajo raiders killed rancher James Whitmore and a ranch hand near the spring in 1866. Local ranchers blamed the Paiute anyway.
Then came John Wesley Powell. The Colorado River explorer and former Union Army officer visited the spring in 1870, and his survey crews used it afterward. Powell saw how desperate the Paiute had become. He was the first government official to propose federal food and farmland for them, but Washington didn’t act on it until 1907.
The Mormon Ranch
Mormon pioneers found the spring in the late 1850s. After Whitmore’s death, Brigham Young bought the claim, and between 1870 and 1872 church members built Winsor Castle, a sandstone fort, directly over the spring.
It became a tithing ranch. Mormon pioneers often paid their tithes in livestock rather than cash, and the herds came here. From 1870 to 1877, workers milked 80 to 100 cows every day, and the beef, butter, and cheese fed hundreds of men building the St. George Temple. It was an impressive feat of frontier work, and a way station and telegraph office for a remote corner of the West.
It was also devastating for the land and its first people. Mormon settlers ran thousands of cattle across the Strip’s grasslands. Brigham Young spoke of bringing lands that “now lie waste” into cultivation. To the Paiute, those lands had never been waste. Cattle and sheep ate the same plants and seeds the Paiute depended on. A Kaibab elder, interviewed in 1995, remembered taking her daughters into the hills to show them the seeds her mother and grandmother had gathered. The next year, cattle came through. “They cleaned it out,” she said. “So there were no more seeds.”
Near Collapse, and a Reservation
By the late 1800s, the Kaibab Paiute had no treaty, no reservation, and no federal aid. When the Kaibab Plateau became a forest preserve in 1893, they were shut out of their best hunting grounds. This drove them to starvation, causing their population to plummet from about 1,200 in 1860 to just 81 people by 1906.
Some turned to the Ghost Dance, hoping to restore their lost world. Others joined the Latter-day Saints, drawn mainly by the promise of food, clothing, and shelter. Finally, in 1907, the federal government created the Kaibab Indian Reservation. It covered only a fraction of their homeland, and Pipe Spring itself stayed a private ranch in the middle of it.
A National Monument, Shared
In 1923, President Warren G. Harding proclaimed Pipe Spring a national monument. The proclamation gave the Kaibab Paiute the right to use the spring’s water, but ranchers kept using it, and the tribe’s Indian agent reported that the Paiute were still largely shut out. In 1933, the Interior Department finally split the water into thirds, with shares going to the monument and the tribe.
Today you enter through a visitor center built as a cooperative effort and run jointly by the National Park Service and the Kaibab Paiute. The museum tells both stories, often in the tribe’s own words. The water story isn’t over, either: nearby wells have cut the spring’s flow from fifty gallons a minute to about five.
Under a Dark Sky
In 2015, the Kaibab Paiute became the world’s first Dark Sky Nation, and Pipe Spring was named an International Dark Sky Park in 2021. Tribal elders have shared traditional star stories at events here, a reminder that the Paiute have been reading this sky far longer than anyone has been writing about it. The park offers night activities such as guided Full Moon hikes, star parties, and astronomy nights.
For hours and current information, visit the park website at nps.gov/pisp.
