Refuge

On this day in 1919, Zion National Park was established.

The National Park Service describes the Utah preserve this way. "Zion is an ancient Hebrew word meaning a place of refuge or sanctuary. Protected within the park's 229 square miles is a dramatic landscape of sculptured canyons and soaring cliffs. Zion is located at the junction of the Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, and Mojave Desert provinces."

John K. Hillers took today's photograph of Eagle Crag, which is near Zion National Park, during his 1872 expedition with John Wesley Powell. Serving as staff photographer for the expedition, he focused on the unique land formations of the American Southwest. Around 1879 Hillers was hired as a staff photographer for the new Bureau of Ethnology at the Department of the Interior.

Hillers continued the work of the surveys, but his emphasis shifted from geography and geology to archaeology and ethnology. His portraits of the Hopi (Moki) and Navajo, as well as photographs of architecture, domestic life, and rituals, were used by the bureau to record traditional ways of life and supplement material collections. Hillers probably captured Hedipa, a Navajo Woman (below) in 1880.

Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

Pictured top: John K. Hillers, 1843 Germany–1925 USA, Eagle Crag, Rio Virjen, Utah, about 1872, albumen print, 9 1/4 x 12 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.

Pictured bottom: John K. Hillers, 1843 Germany–1925 USA, Hedipa, a Navajo Woman, about 1880, albumen print, 9 1/8 x 7 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.