A Who’s Who for Kirk’s Cabin

Today, all that is left in the single room of Kirk’s Cabin are artifacts accumulated over the past 140 years. Rusted horseshoes, fencing staples, and harness parts litter the dirt floor.
Ancient buckets and a rusted #4 steel-jaw leg-hold coyote trap hang from the walls. Together, these items whisper of former times when the cabin’s first inhabitants struggled to survive in the remote isolation.
As far back as I can remember, only one name is associated with the place—Kirk. But in the research for her 2023 book on the Dugout Ranch, Lee Bennett discovered that someone else was there first.
In 1885, John Eckersley Brown was the first to graze his cattle in the canyon and likely built the cabin. Kirk followed Brown a few years later.
In 1911, when government surveyors conducted the original land survey, another man lived in the cabin—Lawrence Peachman, a prospector with a few cows, spent a few winters there.
All three claimed Moab as their home base during the same period and likely knew each other.
In later years, cowhands from the Indian Creek Cattle Company came, followed by those of the Scorup-Somerville outfit and Redd Ranches just before the park was created.
Hundreds of years before any white men, the place had been home to native Ancestral Puebloan families for multiple generations. They built homes in the cliffs above the canyon floor and ate what the canyon provided, from seeds of native grasses to homegrown vegetables.
Even today, squash planted hundreds of years ago grows at the base of some cliff dwellings—small game, deer, and bighorn sheep added protein when available.
The natives left a written diary of their lives etched or painted on the rock throughout the canyon. The most well-known of that diary in stone is the All-American Man.
Around 1885, John Brown was the first to push his cattle into Upper Salt Creek. While there is no way to prove that he built the cabin, his typical pattern was to construct a permanent place for him and his family to sleep wherever his cattle were.
He had other small ranches close by, one with a permanent cabin. At those ranches, he cultivated hay and planted fruit trees.
Brown was born in Draper, UT in 1861 and came to southeast Utah in 1879 to work as a cowboy for Spud Hudson, whose business was buying cheap cattle in Utah for sale in the mining districts of western Colorado.
In 1883, Hudson sold his Utah holdings to Harold Carlisle of the Lacy, or LC Cattle Company on Spring Creek north of Monticello.
Brown became a prominent citizen of Moab, where he and his wife raised two daughters. He was a colorful and successful character with many friends who elected him to serve as a Grand County Commissioner. His activities cut a wide swath across southeast Utah and into Colorado.
Though he was friendly and personable, Brown’s quick temper forced him into a bump in fortune one tragic night in November 1911.
In an altercation, he fired a bullet at his son-in-law, James Dubois, at the exact moment his daughter jumped between the two, seeking to defuse the tension.
She died instantly as the bullet passed through her heart on its path to her husband’s lungs. Dubois died three hours later.
Brown was charged with two counts of first-degree murder but was acquitted at trial, with the jury citing self-defense in the death of Dubois and accidental in the death of his daughter.
Following the incident, Brown resigned from public office and continued to live in the area, but he was never quite the same.
Rensselaer Lee Kirk, known simply as Lee or “RL” by those who knew him, was born on Valentine’s Day, 1859, in Cincinnati, OH to a family of wealth and status.
His father, John Wesley Kirk, a successful banker in Cambridge, MA, groomed his son to follow the same path by sending him to the best schools and giving him a taste of the lifestyle wealth provided.
The younger Kirk attended what was and still is considered one of the best prep schools in the nation, Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Among its graduates are a former US President, CEOs of major companies, and many Nobel Prize recipients.
According to academy records, Lee entered in 1878 and graduated in 1882. While most of his classmates went on to finish their education at Ivy League schools, Lee Kirk spurned the idea of living the life his peers pursued but instead set his eyes westward.
Unlike most residents of southeast Utah, Lee was brought up traveling the world in first class. In 1876, he went to Europe to visit his mom and sisters in Italy but quickly discovered he hated Europe and returned in short order.
Less than a year after graduating, Lee was in Durango and down on his luck. One night in a local saloon, he watched a kindly southern gentleman win several hands of poker and summoned the nerve to ask if the man could spare the price of a meal.
The response “Why sutainly, young man,” he then pulled a handful of $20 gold pieces from his pocket. “Help yuself.”
The man was Henry Goodman, who became a well-known, successful stockman in the area.
The two struck up a conversation that resulted in Goodman offering Lee Kirk not a job but a partnership in a cattle business he was creating in Montezuma Canyon.
Goodman didn’t realize it, but his offer set the young man on the trail to achieving his lifelong dream of becoming a successful stockman.
Like Brown, Kirk made Moab his home base, where he was a well-respected community member. He died in 1945 and was laid to rest in Moab.