The first settler in what is now Arches National Park was a Civil War veteran named John Wesley Wolfe, who was discharged from the Union Army about 3 weeks before the Battle of Bull Run because he suffered from varicose veins. In 1888 his doctor told him he had to leave Ohio for a dryer climate or he would not live 6 months, so he took his son Fred west and settled on a tract of 150 acres along the west bank of Salt Wash, where his “Wolfe cabin” still stands (figs. 1, 3). From family letters and newspaper clippings compiled by Mrs. Maxine Newell and other members of the National Park Service (Maxine Newell, written commun., 1971), we learn what life in the area was like: We have started a cattle spread on a desert homestead. We call it the Bar-DX Ranch. Fred and I live in a little log house on the bank of a creek that is sometimes dry, sometimes flooded from bank to bank with roaring muddy water. We are surrounded with rocks—gigantic red rock formations, massive arches and weird figures, the like of which youve [sic] never seen. The desert is a hostile, demanding country, hot in summer, cold in winter. The Bar-DX Ranch is a day’s ride from the nearest store, out of the range of schools. Although John Wolfe had promised his wife and his other children that he would return home the first fall that his cattle sales netted enough money, he and Fred stayed on and on, and his wife refused to go west and join her husband and son. Eighteen years later he sent money from his pension check to his daughter, Mrs. Flora Stanley, his son-in-law, Ed Stanley, and his two grandchildren, Esther and Ferol, to join him and Fred at the ranch. Their train was met at Thompson Springs (now Thompson), Utah (fig. 7), by John Wolfe for the 30-mile ride to the ranch by horse and wagon. Sight of the tiny log cabin with only a dirt floor brought tears to his daughter’s eyes, but her spirits rose considerably after John Wolfe promised to build a new log cabin with a wooden floor. But the children were enchanted with this strange country, with the building of the new cabin, and, especially, with getting to go rabbit hunting with Grandpa Wolfe. The Stanleys stayed at the ranch until Esther was 10, then moved to Moab to await the arrival of their third child, Volna. In 1910 John Wolfe sold the Bar-DX Ranch, and the entire family moved to Kansas. John Wolfe later moved back to Ohio, and died at Etna, Licking County, on October 22, 1913, at the age of 84, 25 years after his doctor had warned him to move to a dryer climate or face an early death.