Free Redeye by Clyde Edgerton

one that they was innocent. Then there was the Calvin Boyle trial. But I remember the men and women in our church back when I was a boy. They was mighty good people. People that would give you the shirts off their backs. Mighty good. I don’t really know what happened at Mountain Meadows, and so that’s my opinion on it.”

    . . . The West has never been without its foreigners, large and small, clean and dirty, smart and dumb, handsome and ugly, fierce and timid, rich and poor, &c. Arriving in Mumford Rockabout the same time as Cobb Pittman and Star Copeland was a young Englishman, one Andrew Collier. Collier was of distinguished upper-class English stock . . .

ANDREW COLLIER
    Merriwether Ranch
Mumford Rock, Colorado
United States of America
August 19, 1891
    Dear Father,
    This correspondence brings an urgent request toward which I fervently hope you will be favourably inclined. Rather than continue west across the Pacific to Asia, thence home to England, I wish to remain here in Colorado and return in the spring by an easterly route. As you hear more about my present circumstances, I hope you will concur.
    The landscape here is splendid. The state of Colorado is an alpine region of high mountains and generally rugged terrain. Here, around a ranch in the southwest extreme of the state, the landscape is substantially different from that to the north and east. Here, rather than high mountains, there exists a desert-like terrain formed by plateaus that rise in terraces, and are occasionally laced by gigantic furrows called “canyons,” an adaptation of the Spanish name. On the cusp of the geologicalchange from the mountains to the plateau region is situated the small mining town, Mumford Rock. Abel Merriwether’s ranch is approximately eight miles west of Mumford Rock, which is in turn twenty miles southwest of another town, Garvey Springs. A recently established railroad connects Mumford Rock, Garvey Springs, and Denver, Colorado, the latter being the commercial centre of the state.
    The Bright Owl River, just west of the ranch, runs northeast by southwest. Across the Bright Owl from the ranch is the eastern point of Mesa Largo, the most eminent and extensive mesa in the region—over sixty miles long, and ten to thirty miles wide. The mesa, I am told, is covered on its flat top with small cedars and piñon (
Juniperus occidentalis
and
Pinus cembroides
), which are able to withstand the area’s searing summer heat.
    Within Mesa Largo, along canyon walls, hidden away, are cliff dwellings once inhabited by prehistoric Indians. I am hopeful about the possibility of exploring these dwellings and recording my findings in detail. Only in the last four years has Abel Merriweather—the local cowboy and rancher (and a first-rate chap) on whose ranch I now reside—discovered that Mesa Largo is probably full of cliff dwellings like those described in your Ferguson’s
Aztec Ruins
. Only a few such dwellings have been discovered in isolated canyons in New Mexico and Arizona (nearby territories) and in Brown Canyon, Colorado.
    I am told that the local population believes all pottery fromMesa Largo is only “old Aztec stuff.” But Merriwether is convinced we’re onto something quite different. As plans advance I will send reports, and will surely write from the mesa itself once we are upon it.
    I have uncovered only one study of cliff dwellings in the region. Completed in 1874, it is sketchy at best. Father, I do believe that I could be the first explorer to contribute significant narrative detail based upon systematic observations in Mesa Largo. Many exciting questions arise. During what era did the cliff dwellers arrive on Mesa Largo? When did they leave? Why did they leave? How were their culture and daily lives related to the Mescadey and the pueblo dwellers to the south of Mumford Rock, and to other agricultural and even nomadic tribes of this region?
    Upon my return to England I