The Landscape of Zane Grey

Pipe Spring National Monument
Zane Grey's Inspiration for the Withersteen Ranch

Last fall, the artistic team of the new opera "Riders of the Purple Sage", set off for fabled landscapes steeped in history. We followed to places Zane Grey visited in Arizona over a century ago that were the novelist's real life inspirations for two key locations in “Riders of the Purple Sage”. We visited Pipe Spring National Monument on the Arizona Strip - a remote sliver of Arizona nestled between the Grand Canyon and the Utah line. Zane Grey visited Pipe Spring in 1908 and discovered the Mormon tithing ranch that would become the bedrock of the plot for his most popular novel.

PIPE SPRING NATIONAL MONUMENT
With its spring fed water supply in the middle of an arid stretch of land, and access to some of the best grazing land on the Strip, it is easy to see how Grey could craft this lonely outpost into the focal point of the struggle for wealth and power that drives “Riders of the Purple Sage.” When we dropped into the valley a rush of wonder engulfed us like a stampede. What a confluence of landscape and longing, what sublime beauty and reverent desolation. What was life like here in the late 1800s on the dusty frontier? Perhaps Zane Grey thought the same thing when decided to turn Pipe Spring into the fictional Withersteen Ranch.

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NOW: The fort doors on Winsor Castle have been restored by the National Park Service.

THEN: Ranch foreman Edwin D. Woolley, his family and the Chamberlain family, and ranch hands on April 27, 1891. Photo courtesy of National Park Service, Pipe Spring National Monument, PSIP 1074

More Pipe Spring history

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The red stone fortress of Winsor Castle is as breathtaking in its own way as the geologic wonder of the Vermillion Cliffs that frame it. Pipe Spring was established by Mormons as a tithing ranch in the early 1870s and brought the first telegraph to Arizona Territory. It was a popular spot on the “Honeymoon Trail.” Travelers on their way to get married in the Temple in St. George would water their horses at Pipe Spring - a piece of history that may have inspired Zane Grey’s iconic opening scene when Lassiter stops to water his horse and interrupts Elder Tull preparing the whip Venters.

Completed in 1872, the fort was built directly over its water source so pioneers could lock themselves inside and persevere through Navajo raids, or outlast troops sent by the Federal government looking to arrest polygamists. Those attacks never came and the settlers peacefully grazed cattle and made butter and cheese that supplied Mormon families in the region until the 1890s.

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"The home of Jane Withersteen...was a flat, long, red-stone structure with a covered court in the center through which flowed a lively stream of amber-colored water."
                                     - Zane Grey, 'Riders of the Purple Sage'

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Along with the pioneering history of the Arizona Strip, we discovered Zane Grey's creative process. Grey would visit remote places that were still mysterious and exotic, hear the stories from the people who lived there, and learn the hardships of fashioning a life on the bleeding edge of the frontier. He would then sit down with pencil and paper and voraciously write his experiences of the landscape and its characters with a fictional mix of romance and action. Zane Grey's Western novels defined a new American genre and left a legacy that would inform other novels, movies, TV shows, and the way we think about the mythic territory of the West, for years to come.