In Utah's Price Canyon, you'll find a monument marking the spot where legendary outlaw Butch Cassidy robbed the local mining company. Butch is a hero to some folks around here.
At the top of the 10-mile-long road up the canyon, you'll find the Hilltop Country store, one of the last remnants of the town of Colton. Buy a cup of coffee at the old-fashioned lunch counter, and owner Dennis Finch will gladly show you a picture of his grandfather with Butch Cassidy.
Historians say Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died in a hail of gunfire in Bolivia a century ago. But Dennis swears that Butch returned home to Utah after paying someone to identify him as the bandit killed in South America.
Dennis should know. His grandfather grew up with Butch and his mom knew Butch.
 83-year old Dennis Finch - of Colton, UT - holds a photograph of his grandfather and Butch Cassidy (Butch Cassidy standing on the left and Dennis's grandfather Orrin Elmer on the right). Orrin's family moved to southern UT where they met and became friends with Butch Cassidy's family.
"She always said he was quite the gentleman," said Dennis, now 83. The way Dennis tells it, Butch was a Robin Hood who never killed anyone in his robberies.
"There was a widow who couldn't pay her taxes and was going to lose her farm. Butch gave her some of his own money to pay the bills - then he turned around and robbed the tax collector to get the money back," Dennis said.
Historians say Butch and Sundance were among the most active robbers around the turn of the century, but they took great pains to avoid shooting people. Dennis said no one challenged Butch because everyone knew how good he was with a gun.
"He could carve his initials with a six-shooter and never miss a shot," he said.
That was about the time Colton was a bustling community of maybe 300 people: railroad workers, miners and shop owners - like Dennis' family who bought the general store in 1930s.
But like most other towns in the area, Colton dried up quickly when the coal mines moved to other sites and the railroads needed fewer crewmen to maintain the lines.
Look closely and you'll see the remnants of these towns as you drive along Route 6 from Green River to Spanish Fork.
Of course, the local folks - including the sheriff - knew Butch returned there after he was supposedly killed in 1908, but no one minded as long as he kept his nose clean, Dennis said.
"It wasn't the local marshals that wanted him, it was the Pinkertons - and they never got him."
And Sundance?
Well, he changed his name, but not his lifestyle. He was arrested some years later and spent the rest of his life in prison. The officials never figured out who he was until his family came to claim the body.
And that's the real story, according to Dennis.
POGUE'S WAR
Like a lot of folks around here, Roy Clay Pogue doesn't particularly care for the government, especially the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Roy said 80 percent of Utah's land is publicly owned and people worry that they won't have much say in how the land's used.
 Roy Sr. (l) and Roy Jr. Pogue (r) stand in front of what was once known as the Roadside Geyser in Woodside, UT. From around 1910 to 1970 the Geyser used to be a popular tourist attraction, but now it's on Roy Jr's land - for his enjoyment.
Roy is the last resident left in Woodside, Utah, which was once a railroad terminal and the largest town within 100 miles. He owns a ranch with 800 acres bordering the Price River. He also owns a (now-closed) gas station and a geyser that spouts 40-feet into the air every hour or so. It was quite a tourist attraction until the state moved Route 6, taking the geyser off the highway.
"We had a gift shop over there," he said, as we toured the property.
Not long ago, there was a herd of cattle on the ranch and that's how Roy's losing dispute with the BLM began. Roy said the BLM, which owns the land next to his ranch, told him to stop his cattle from wandering onto its land.
"They told me I had to fence off my land or get rid of my cattle. I couldn't afford 11 miles of fencing, so I auctioned off the cattle."
Later, the BLM began leasing its land to ranchers whose cattle strayed onto Roy's property, he said.
"When I complained, they told me I should fence off my property. They want it both ways," he said. Roy said a lawyer told him he could sue the BLM, but the government could tie the case up in court for years.
"I couldn't afford that, either," he said.
So now Roy has a few llamas, a couple of cows, a geyser and no fences to keep out the neighbors' cattle.
Oh, he now survives mostly on his veterans pension.
Score one for the bureaucrats.
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 An Allosaurus skeleton is displayed at the Dinosaur Museum in Price, UT along with many other skeletal rremians from the Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry. Most of the bones date back 147 million years to the Jurassic period.
A few months later, a scientist in Utah discovered the remains of a dinosaur similar to the velociraptor - except twice as big. They call it the Utahraptor - but it was really Spielberg's dinosaur.
It's no surprise that the discovery came in Utah, a world-class dinosaur graveyard. They call east central Utah "The Dinosaur Diamond," an area filled with dino finds and prehistoric museums. The College of Eastern Utah, alone, has uncovered nine new species in the region during the past decade.
The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry has the richest concentration of Jurassic bones ever found. Experts aren't sure why there are so many bones at Cleveland-Lloyd, but they do know that 250 million years ago, the area was a subtropical wonderland with alligators, crocodiles, palm trees, vines and boa constrictors as well as dinosaurs.
But that's no guarantee you'll find bones millions of years later.
"You have to find dinosaurs living where there were sediments that came and buried their bones fairly rapidly - within one to 20 years," said Reese Barrick, Curator of Paleontology at the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah.
Barrick, who also teaches at the college, moved here to be closer to the dinosaur action.
"You get an opportunity to see real dinosaurs in an area where they lived. When you find something new, it really does excite you. You get a tingling," he said.
In the museum, you'll see some of the newly uncovered species including the Utahraptor and a massive unnamed brachiosaur whose neck, alone, was over 15 feet long.
You'll also see what made the velociraptors such vicious predators. They had giant, hooked claws on their feet that could cut five-foot-long gashes in their prey. They hunted in packs and brought down far larger dinosaurs.
You'll find prehistoric turtles with teeth and dimetrodons - mammal reptiles that lived before the dinosaurs. Kids can hunt for dino bones in a giant sandbox.
And you'll find that there are more questions than answers about dinosaurs. No one knows, for sure, what caused their rapid extinction. There are plenty of theories: climate changes, predators, giant asteroids, and disease. It could be any or all of them.
Even the Cleveland-Lloyd quarry is a puzzle. Just how did all those bones get there? Here are some clues:
- Most of the bones come from the Jurassic period (130-150 million years ago).
- The area was swampy.
- All sizes of bones are found there.
- There are more meat eaters than plant eaters.
- The bones are not broken or bite marked, meaning the dinosaurs weren't eaten.
- The bones are found in clay-like fresh water sediment.
If you solve that puzzle you'll be doing better than the experts.
Some paleontologists think the Cleveland-Lloyd area was a swamp that trapped huge plant-eating dinos in the mud, which then trapped the flesh eaters who came to feast on the plant eaters.
Barrick prefers the theory that the animals drank from a salt lake and died. An upheaval covered their bones and the salt leached out.
Hmm. Maybe they should ask Steven Spielberg.
THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY
In Utah, folks call the 60-mile stretch of road from Price to Spanish Fork: "The Devil's Highway". They even have bumper stickers that say, "I Survived Highway 6." Here, drivers traveling 80-miles an hour think nothing of passing semis and campers on steep, winding canyon roads.
"The nearby mountains are filled with coal, oil, shale - and history. Take the village of Helper, which sits at the bottom of Price Canyon, just before the 10-mile-long hill up to Soldier Summit.
 The second floor lobby and the many rooms of the Kenyon B&B in Helper, UT were once one of five brothels along with 28 bars in the small town. Once a rowdy railroad and mining town, Helper received its name from the early railroad days when a second engine was added to help trains up Price Canyon.
When the railroad came through the canyon, trains needed an extra engine to help conquer the hill. That's how helper got it's name.
But Helper got it's reputation from something else.
"There were five brothels and 28 bars here," said Bill Marston, looking up and down the single main street of town which hardly seems big enough for all that activity.
Bill owns one of those former brothels. Now it's Kenyon Inn. Bill bought the place several years ago and is renovated the old hotel. But he kept some of the bordello touches and atmosphere.
If you want to stay someplace different, try the Kenyon. But don't expect the Holiday Inn. And be sure to grab a bite at the Balanced Rock, a wonderful, quirky restaurant a few doors down the street.
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