Matt Warner, born Willard Erastus Christianson in Ephraim, Utah on April 12, 1864, was a complex figure of the American West. Early in his life, he fled east toward Vernal after a violent altercation with another boy who had tried to steal his date for a Mormon dance. In the area around Diamond Mountain and Brown’s Park, he began an outlaw career rustling livestock, and records show that in the fall of 1886 he used 124 horses as collateral for a loan of $847.90, though the records do not show how he obtained them. He later gained notoriety as a bank robber, often associated with Butch Cassidy. In 1894, land office records show that Erastus W. Christiansen filed a homestead claim for 160 acres within a half-day’s horseback ride of the modern-day reservoir that bears his name. In 1896, he was convicted of manslaughter for an incident in Dry Fork Canyon near Vernal; he maintained that he had been protecting a claim when three men ambushed him, and that he killed two of them and wounded the third. Sentenced to five years in prison, he was pardoned by the Governor on the expectation that he would abandon his life of crime. He then went straight and was elected by the people of Price, Utah, to serve as a justice of the peace and deputy sheriff. He died in Price, Utah, on December 21, 1938.