Orson Blackburn & George Stoddard
Two names and a day, cut into a sandstone wall above the Muddy and left to weather for a century and a half. It is a primary record — and the only record of these men that survives anywhere. They appear on no settler roll, in no county history, on no page. Only on the stone.
The reading
The S characters are cut in mirror-image, a common frontier hand, and “George” is carved GORGE. Corrected reading: Orson Blackburn and George Stoddard, 17 May 1879.
The date, and the ground
The year on the stone is the year the country opened. The settlement then called “the Muddy” — today the town of Emery — was settled in 1879 by Casper Christensen and the Lund family; the Old Spanish Trail had long crossed Muddy Creek a few miles east. In May of that founding season, two riders stopped at a canyon wall and signed it.
Yet the settler record keeps neither name. A full-text search of Lever’s History of Sanpete and Emery Counties (1898) — the standard biography of exactly this region — returns no Blackburn and no George Stoddard. Nor does Gottfredson’s chronicle of the frontier, nor any searchable source. Men who would have earned a printed sketch had they stayed do not appear; these two most likely passed through — travelers, or a scouting party at the crossing. Whatever brought them, the paper world forgot them. The rock did not.
The finding
The inscription was located and photographed by Jacob Hardy on his own expedition — a single night across the San Rafael Swell on muleback, from Highway 24 to the convergence on the Muddy, up Salt Creek to the Swinging Bridge, on to Fuller Bottom, and up to Wellington. The precise site is held private.
