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GREEN RIVER - While exploring what would eventually become his family's remote Range Creek Canyon ranch, a young Waldo Wilcox and a friend stumbled across an ancient stone-and-wood granary used by Fremont Indians.
Even though Wilcox knew better, he etched his name onto that granary, built more than 1,000 years ago to hold corn and other crops that the Fremont raised.
When Ray Wilcox, Waldo's father, found out about that little episode, he gave his son an earful.
That stern lecture made a lasting impact on Waldo Wilcox, who was about 11 at the time.
This and other lessons from his parents launched Wilcox on a lifelong mission to protect the priceless Fremont remnants on the many Range Creek acres his family began buying in the 1940s.
The Wilcox family spent more than 50 years keeping looters, vandals and other troublemakers off their land, where cows grazed among the canyon's pithouses, rock art panels and granaries.
"My dad didn't want 'em destroyed," Wilcox said recently, resting at his Green River home in a leather chair under the mounted head of a horned sheep he bagged in Texas. "They didn't belong to us."
From the dark-paneled living room of the small house he has lived in for 20 years, Wilcox, 74, can look north to the Book Cliffs, the rugged formations that sheltered the Range Creek ranch he and his family owned until 2001.
He can only trust that others will now carry on the preservation ethic that Ray and Pearl Wilcox ingrained into their two children.
Fremont treasures: The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources now manages the old 4,200-acre Wilcox Ranch, including its virtually pristine collection of archaeological sites that could greatly expand what is known about the mysterious Fremont culture.
In 2001, Waldo Wilcox sold the ranch to the Trust for Public Land, a conservation group that used $2.5 million from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and state funds. The BLM managed the land before transferring it to the state earlier this year.
Wilcox cracked a smile when asked how he sold the land to the government while holding onto the mineral, oil and gas rights for parts of Range Creek.
"A lot of people would like to know that," he said.
Wilcox wouldn't reveal any specific plans, but hinted these rights could be available for sale to the government down the road.
Over the years, a few oil companies have drilled test wells in Range Creek, although it remains unclear what resources might lie below.
Much of the state's recent interest in the land has focused on its archaeological resources.
Archaeologists have spent the past few summers surveying the sites, which can range from a few artifacts on the ground to large pithouses, which were recessed into the ground for insulation against heat and cold.
More than 200 sites have been documented so far, and there probably are thousands waiting to be found.
"The archaeological sites there are a treasure that must be cared for," state archaeologist Kevin Jones wrote to Waldo Wilcox in a 2002 letter. "We cannot let the efforts of you and your family to protect the archaeology be in vain."
A special place: Jeanie Jensen, Wilcox's niece, realized from an early age that Range Creek was a special place. Her family worked land near Range Creek. In her youth, she visited Waldo Wilcox's family in the canyon.
"It was just instilled in us that it was part of the canyon and just to be left there," Jensen said of the canyon's Fremont sites. Jensen married a neighbor, Butch, whose family owned land near Range Creek on a nearby plateau. Jeannie and Butch Jensen run a guest ranch that overlooks the old Wilcox property.
Jeanie Jensen said the Wilcox family, including her late dad, Wilcox's brother Don, did what they could to protect the land.
"Everything was behind locked gates. That's the only reason anything is left at all," she said.
Waldo Wilcox said those fences did not exactly win many friends over the years.
"One woman told me, 'You're a hero for what you've done.' he said. He replied, 'Ma'am, I was called everything you could think of when I had those gates locked.'
These efforts to keep looters away from the Fremont sites rarely came up in conversation, said Alton "Tunie" Burns, a friend in Green River who has known Wilcox for 30 years. Most discussions about Range Creek centered on ranching life.
"He's just an old cowboy from up on Range Creek," said Burns. The friends, who have grown closer since Wilcox sold Range Creek, walk their dogs together nearly every day.
Ranching tradition: Ranching runs deep in the Wilcox family, as Waldo followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, who both grew up in Utah.
Starting in his youth, Waldo Wilcox handled cow chores and helped grow alfalfa and corn on a few hundred acres of irrigated land on the ranch. The family lived in a cabin on the ranch during the summer.
His parents owned several ranches near the Green River before buying a chunk of Range Creek in 1942. Wilcox, who went to Carbon High School in Price, said his parents moved to the ranch on horseback with a train of pack mules. When Wilcox finally vacated Range Creek a few years ago, he left by truck.
An old wooden wagon that belonged to his grandfather sits in the driveway of the 2-acre Green River property where Wilcox lives with his wife, Julie.
Since the 2001 ranch sale, Wilcox has returned to Range Creek several times as a visitor, most notably during the media frenzy that descended on the land June 30 when the state unveiled the site to the public. Reporters hung on his every word. Photographers captured his every move.
Even when he tried to get a moment alone, the media hunted him down.
"I was going out in the brush, and finally I heard somebody coming right behind me," he said. Wilcox recalled that a woman asked "Are you going to the bathroom or is this a historic site?"
Wilcox replied, "Honey, it's going to be a historic site either way."
Made-for-TV movie? Although the media storm has ended, Wilcox still fields requests for interviews. A cable network has offered to produce a special about him, and a book offer has come his way.
"Who in the hell would read the book if you wrote one?" Wilcox said.
Wilcox said he is at a loss for what to do in his retirement, but a stroll around his property reveals a few hobbies. Among them is forging iron brands, stirrups, horse bits and related gear, stored in a metal container near his grandfather's wagon.
Various members of the Wilcox family, in the 1950s and again in the 1970s, expanded their Range Creek land holdings. But in the end, Wilcox said, there were not enough acres to allow each of his four children to make a living off the land. The money from the sale will be easier to split evenly among his children, who all work in the oil industry in eastern Utah.
Without the ranch, Wilcox seems content to occasionally sit on a green plastic chair perched on his front steps, staring off toward the Book Cliffs, the rugged landscape that was so much a part of his life.
After devoting so many years to preserving Range Creek, Wilcox said, he has second thoughts about the sale and wonders whether the state will be able to protect the land.
"I still wish I had it back," he said, "but I couldn't take care of it if I did."