Attention was then focused on the upper Paria. The first settlers, David O. Littlefield and Orley D. Bliss, located near the present site of Cannonville on Christmas Eve, 1874. Early the next day eight other families arrived, who built log houses at a place called Clifton and began farming along the Paria and on Henrieville Creek. Ebenezer Bryce, from Pine Valley, selected a place farther upstream, a mile or two east of the present site of Tropic near the mouth of Bryce Canyon. Bryce used the famous canyon for a cattle range, and thus immortalized his name. Clifton was not well located and in 1877 some settlers moved to a new townsite called Cannonville, in honor of George Q. Cannon, high Mormon official who had taken a special interest in their affairs. Other settlers moved over to Henrieville Creek to be near their farms, and thus the town of Henrieville (named for James Henrie, president of Panguitch Stake) was born. In 1879 Daniel Goulding settled near Bryce’s ranch. Seeking water for irrigation, he and Bryce devised a scheme to divert water from Pine Creek in the Great Basin by means of a canal over the divide. This they finished, but upkeep was expensive, their crops were poor, and Goulding lost about five hundred fruit trees from drouth. Bryce became discouraged and left for Arizona in 1880 and Goulding moved to Henrieville in 1883. Bryce, unimpressed by the beauty of the canyon, considered it “awful hard to find a cow that was lost” in the intricate maze of its pinnacles. Seth Johnson and several others located in 1886 on Yellow Creek (Kane County) about three miles southwest of Cannonville and named the settlement Georgetown, in honor of the same man for whom Cannonville was named. In 1890 the two Ahlstrom brothers built homes on the present site of Tropic and with several others began a second and more ambitious attempt to divert water from the East Fork of Sevier River over the divide into Paria Creek. This time the project succeeded. Tropic townsite was surveyed in 1891 and settlers began to flock there and prepare homes and lands in anticipation of the coming of the water. A fitting celebration was staged on May 23, 1892, when the water was turned into the canal. By this time, most of the suitable valleys and canyons had been occupied. Erosion, however, caused trouble at Kanab. From 1883 to 1890, floods presumably resulting from overgrazing tore out dams and ditches and gutted the canyons and valleys with deep washes. Water arose in the bottom of the washes and that in Kanab Wash (below Kanab) was diverted about 1886 onto a new townsite just beyond the state line in Arizona, called Fredonia, which later served as a refuge for a number of polygamous wives during the Federal offensive against the practice.[86]