Uintah County, Utah Pioneers

William Gibson

William "Billy" Gibson first saw the virgin Ashley Valley in 1869 from a hill that stretched along the north rim of the valley northeast of Ashley town. He would build a cattle ranch that could be viewed from that ridge. Many years later he later choose a family cemetery site and "dug his own grave in the brow of a rocky ridge a hundred above the valley floor and lined it with six inches of concrete." When Gibson finished his tomb, he took his bed roll and spent the night in the grave. He arose the next morning, stretched the kinks out of his aging muscles, looked up at his three grandsons who stood by the graveside and announced, 'It's a good fit. I slept fine all night.'"

"As he stood on the ridge, Gibson could see his ranch buildings below, his herd of cattle grazing in lush meadowns where he had grubbed head-high sagebrush, bush by bush. He declared, 'That's the view I want to see first come resurrection morning and I want you boys to see that this grave stays where it is after I'm in it.' Fixed with a commanding gaze from the old man's piercing blue eyes, the boys made a promise that they were destined to break thirty-seven years later when the site became part ot Steinaker Dam. Gibson's grandsons, by then prominent men in the community, were forced to exhume the remains of their grandfather and seven other relatives who lay buried in the tiny Gibson graveyard and re-inter them in the Vernal Cemetery."1

In 1898, when the American battleship Maine was blown up in the Havana, Cuba harbor, "Gibson, then a member of the Utah House of Representatives from Uintah County, conceived the idea to paint the motto [Remember the Maine] high on an Ashley Canyon cliff as an enduring tribute that also represented the sentiment of the citizens of Ashley Valley at the time." He paid Leo Voight a sum of fifty dollars to paint the motto on the steep 400 foot cliff. His theory was that if it were high enough off the ground, it would be safe from vandals. Voight, with the help of volunteers who lowered him about 225 feet over the edge of the cliff, painted Remember the Maine using a mixture of lamp black and linseed oil. They thought they had created a memorial that was higher than the Washington Monument which was at that time the highest in the world. But it was later measured and determined to be no more than 400 feet.2

1Burton, Doris Karren, Settlements of Uintah County: Digging Deeper, Uintah County Library, 1998, p. 52.
2 Ibid., p. 143.

Contributed by Marilyn Hersey Brown