Caravan Spring

The Baker-Fancher party that set out from here was more Arkansan than its Utah ending suggests. About forty families, mostly from Marion, Crawford, Carroll and Johnson counties, met at Beller's Stand just south of Harrison, and Captain Fancher of Carroll County, who had made the California trip twice before, may have led the combined train. They left in April 1857; the attack at Mountain Meadows began that September. Jacob Forney, Utah's Superintendent of Indian Affairs, retrieved many of the seventeen surviving children from Mormon homes in 1859, and the Army returned them to relatives in Arkansas.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Boxley Valley Historic District — 18 mi
  A seven-mile farm valley of log houses, a grist mill and a 1980s elk herd inside Buffalo National River, still lived in and still grazed by cattle.
• Lost Valley Trail — 18 mi
  A box-canyon walk past a natural bridge, a 2,000-year-old bluff shelter and a 53-foot waterfall, the most popular hike in Buffalo National River.
• Buffalo National River at Tyler Bend — 24 mi
  The country's first national river, kept free-flowing after a dam fight that ended in 1965, seen from the Middle District's visitor center, the Collier Homestead and the Riverview Trail.
• Whitaker Point (Hawksbill Crag) — 27 mi
  The one designated trail in the Upper Buffalo Wilderness leads to Hawksbill Crag, a bluff over the river's headwaters in a valley no one has lived in since 1948.

More markers nearby

• Boone County Men Served Both Armies — 3.9 mi
• Military Activity in Boone County — 3.9 mi
• Skirmish at Rolling Prairie — 9.7 mi
• Civil War in Newton County — 12 mi