Canyon Riders

Canyon country is easy to get lost in and hard to be found in, and in the late 1800s some riders counted on exactly that.

In southeastern Utah, between the Green, Colorado and Dirty Devil rivers, lies a maze of steep-walled canyons and hidden draws called Robbers Roost. Horse thieves were using it by the 1870s. Butch Cassidy knew it in the 1880s, and the Wild Bunch made it one stop on the Outlaw Trail, a string of hideouts that ran north through Brown's Hole to Hole-in-the-Wall in Wyoming. The place protected them because there were so few ways in. A posse could ride for days and never find the right side canyon.

Nothing in this painting says who these two are. They could be hands hunting strays or travelers taking the only route through. The canyon treats them the same either way.

The walls take up nearly the whole picture, painted as smooth, banded slabs of red, orange, cream and violet that rise out of the frame, with one narrow wedge of blue sky between them. The two riders are tiny on the sandy floor, one behind the other, riding away from us deeper into the cut. The men are the smallest thing in the scene, and that is the point.