Show the old settler 0 my dear san Jua ners from schools and classes and I 1 associations far and near I 1 re receive ceide i requests foran for an account cf a the first settlement of blanding having been the first settler at what became blanding it seems to betoken betaken be taken for granted that I 1 should make a pe pen n picture of it for all comers I 1 have no objection to letting them know but my time is woefully limited it is too long a story and has too many indispensable angles to undertake to write it or to tell it without making a special appointment of time for that purpose it was on the 2nd and of april 1905 that I 1 stopped my team in the sage brush and began with my iny wife and child to make what was to become blanding there was not a house a fence nor a piece of cleared land in the area where the town was destined to be built the country was dry as a bone and I 1 had to haul or carry our drinking water from westwater gulch a mile to the west or from a doubtful waterhole water hole about a mile to the east it was not a promising prospect but I 1 was enthusiastic about it as I 1 have continued to be ever since with a four horse harse team a rambling furrow had been plowed through the brush across what we called the townsite PV and in this the water was expected to come soon after two or three weeks the water did come in a doubtful trickle to f fail ail each day under the heat of the rising sun and come less and less each night until it failed to come at all an old cowpuncher who camped near where I 1 pitched my tent a man who had known the coun country try for 30 years told me I 1 was crazy to stop there with my little family and predicted that we would choke to death four other families came during the summer but two of them moved away for the winter and three of us stayed in the snowy solitude that winter more families came in the spring of 1906 and the water arrived a little earlier and stayed a little longer the new place was very unpopular with certain self styled sages but it grew in spite of their adverse predictions and in the fall of 1907 a school was opened in a 1 foot tent the following year it took two tents f for or all the grades and the next year a frame school house was built the development of BI blanding anding was phenomenal not only in the increase of population but in the surprising growth of the water supply where that water came from was a much discussed question and the people most astonished were s those who had been longest in the country in 1907 we opened a store which later became the grayson coop co op and is flourishing still as the parley redd store settlers from bluff were the first foundation ck for the new town but from rev revolutionary alu tion ary torn mexico came a sturdy string of mormon colonists who had been criven from their homes and they became the dominant class extending the original town limits away into thick jungles of cedars on the northwest looking at blanding today with its big trees its fine homes and sprawling population of about 1200 it is not easy to believe it is is little more than 37 years old to gt these facts once clearly in mind with due consideration of the limited resources on which the place has grown is to see and know that similar towns some smaller some larger are yet to be developed in san juan county ALBERT R LYMAN |