During the Meeker Incident of September 1879, angered White River Utes killed a dozen soldiers and Indian Agency employees, prompting frightened settlers in Ashley Valley to join together for protection. Many of these recently arrived settlers dismantled their cabins, numbered the logs, and rebuilt them at a fort site with cedar post buttresses, intending to form a square fort, but construction stopped after three sides were completed when government forces gained control of the Utes. Although no further conflict with Native Americans came that fall, the fort proved vital during the following Hard Winter, when isolated families might otherwise have perished, and in early spring 1880 settlers successfully traveled to Green River, Wyoming, for supplies that revived the valley. The community was variously called Jericho, Hatch Town, and the Bench before the federal postal service assigned the name Vernal in 1886. As Ashley declined into a ghost town, Vernal rose under leaders including saloon keeper and mayor S.M. Browne, earning praise in 1902 as the biggest little city off the railroad and a model of city government with no city tax revenue and officials who served without pay. Founded first on agriculture and ranching, the surrounding Uinta Basin later became a major producer of oil, gas, Gilsonite, coal, phosphate, oil shale, and asphalt, while Vernal also developed as a gateway to Ashley National Forest, the High Uinta Mountains, Flaming Gorge Reservoir, the Green River watershed, and Dinosaur National Monument, established in 1915. Known as Dinosaurland, the region supports tourism as well as energy development, and Vernal, recognized among America's top fifty small cities in 1993 and 1995, had grown by 2002 to about 7,000 residents in a county of 25,000, with civic groups continuing to promote growth, youth programs, and beautification.