Blanding is located on U. Highway at about m altitude on a stretched in a north-south direction of Table Mountain only between two temporary water leading washs that run south to the San Juan River. In the north, the Abajo Mountains lie to the Abajo Peak. On first contact with white people, the region was inhabited by the Navajo Indians. Your Navajo Nation Reservation, it now covers the south of the county, but not enough to Blanding. The Ute Indians were occasional raids from the east in the region.
From there they settled the approximately 70 km to the north Monticello. Until , the first families settled on Table Mountain and built a canal to supply the new settlement names Grayson with water from the Johnson Creek, who came from the mountains and performs permanent water. Between and , the city grew due to the influx of Mormons who were originally emigrated from the U.
They came back now, as there political unrest broke out and were looking for new settlement areas in Utah. In Francis A. Hammond, newly appointed LDS stake president, sent out an exploring party from Bluff to evaluate possible townsites that could support an agricultural and livestock economy.
Monticello, twenty-two miles north of Blanding, received the initial attention in this colonizing effort. For ten more years White Mesa remained the haunt of the diminishing livestock herds of the non-Mormon L. Not until , when Walter C. Lyman with his brother Joseph loaded a buckboard with supplies and left Bluff to investigate White Mesa's potential, did the idea of a community there start to take shape.
At one point, Lyman looked out over the sea of sage and, according to accounts, had a vision that one day this isolated area would have an LDS temple and play an important role in serving Naive Americans, especially through education. This idea was hard to accept at the time, and it was just as difficult to imagine how irrigation water could be obtained from the mountain.
But a half-dozen people believed, marked out the route of a canal from Johnson Creek, and then went to work to make it a reality. The LDS Church called many of these men on missions, but by they had returned and completed their work. By April Albert R. Lyman, Walter's nephew, had pitched his tent amid the sagebrush in the newly surveyed town. By July, five other families were established and the town had started its climb in population. First known as Grayson after Nellie Grayson Lyman, wife of Joseph , the town changed its name in when a wealthy easterner, Thomas F.
Bicknell, offered a thousand-volume library to any Utah town that would adopt his name. Grayson vied with Thurber now Bicknell for the prize; the two towns split the books and Grayson assumed Bicknell's wife's maiden name - Blanding.
Instead, what they encountered was a narrow notch in the canyon wall, nicknamed the Hole-In-The-Rock that led down to the Colorado River more than feet below. Opting to take their chances going down the steep crack, the expedition blasted, chiseled, and shoveled a path toward the river. When they neared the bottom, the settlers realized their only hope of reaching the river safely would be to build their road out from the canyon wall.
So they pounded oak timbers into a series of holes they had drilled into the rock and then drove their wagons down the wooden road to the ferry that would take them across the Colorado. On the far bank, the group clawed their way back up another canyon face and across more rugged ground, until, exhausted and hungry, they drove their wagons into the flatlands along the San Juan River where Bluff now stands. It had taken the settlers nearly six months to travel a distance they thought would only take six weeks.
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