There never was a shootout at Morrison to leave a few crumbling gravestones in a tiny cemetery half-hidden inside a tattered fence.
The town has no shattered ruins silhouetted against a darkening sky.That may be the reason why Morrison, a pioneer mining camp a couple of miles up Six Mile Canyon, has been given no mention in the accounts of the ghost towns of the West or even of Utah.
And that's a crying shame, says a local history buff. "Morrison de- serves better."
Morrison was named for Jack Morrison, an Englishman who brought a bundle of English money, with the encouragement of Gov. Simon Bamberger, to the Sanpete Valley for the purpose of bringing a narrow gauge railroad up Salt Creek Canyon, down to Coal Bed (now Wales) and on to the newly opened coal mine in Six Mile Canyon.
The railroad would haul coal from Coal Bed and Six Mile to market and thus make several rich Englishmen even richer. The Sanpete Valley Railroad was built, it hauled away some cards of coal and then its coal-hauling died. The coal seams at Coal Bed were not wide enough for efficient operation; the Morrison Mine was flooded with a stream that couldn't be conquered.
In its brief history, Morrison was the site of a few shanties, had an explosion that killed two miners and soon became a ghost town - its legacy some coal slack at the site, a few pieces of track and the Morrison stream.
And it's the ever-flowing stream, all 2.7 second feet of it, that makes Morrison a most notable ghost town.
Because the stream played an important role in helping Daniel Buckley Funk realize his dream of a resort - boating, fishing and dancing - that would serve much of central Utah.
Funk purchased land in the Arropine Valley from Chief Arropine - some legends say for a couple of ponies, others say for a few sacks of flour - and laid claim to the Morrison Stream, which was tumbling into Six Mile Creek.
He would bring the stream across the creek, build a dam across the south end of Arropine Valley and have the lake that was essential to his dream.
Chief Arropine is supposed to have laughed at the project.
But Funk and his sons brought Morrison water over Six Mile Creek in a wooden trestle and along open ditches to the site of Funk's Lake - now Palisade State Park.
In time the ditch was replaced by a wooden pipe line and still later by a steel pipeline.
In a now famous document, Judge LeRoy H. Cox, in an allocation of Sevier River Basin waters, including the Morrison flow, awarded a half-second of the Morrison stream to the Sterling Irrigation Co.; one-half second foot to the North Six Mile Irrigation Co.; one second foot to the Gunnison Irrigation Co. and the remainder to what is now Palisade State Park.
And thus, in its minor way, the water that flooded a mine, now helps to irrigate 5,000 acres.
"Morrison, a living ghost town, if ghost towns live," the local historian says.