—
It was a Thursday when I headed out to the Coos shelter. The weather for that day and the upcoming weekend looked mild, with daytime highs in the low forties and clear skies. We couldn’t have asked for a better forecast. Soldier Creek Cattle Company was having its centennial founder’s day celebration that would kick off Friday evening and last into the afternoon on Sunday. Already the one hotel in Rangely was full, as were the two hotels in Rio Mesa. Old Crow Medicine Show was scheduled to play at Rangely High School on Friday night, followed by a barbecue with a four-hundred-pound spit roast at Trip Mortenson’s ranch. These kinds of events drew in crowds from several counties over, as well as folks from Wyoming and along the eastern border of Utah. The concert alone was expecting a crowd of a couple of thousand, and the barbecue would no doubt go on well into the night. Only two nights before, Colm had been called to break up a pre-celebration party that had gotten out of hand. One of the local cattle ranchers had roasted a couple of lambs, a mock commemoration of the sheep wars that used to go on about the same time the Soldier Creek Cattle Company was founded. Cattlemen didn’t like their public grazing lands being taken over by the sheepherders. During those years, close to a hundred thousand sheep were killed, many having been run off the edge of steep, rocky cliffs.
Trip’s property contained the original Soldier Creek homestead and was located just past Tommys Draw on the south end of Cathedral Bluffs. From the Coos rock shelter, one could look out over Bowman Canyon and spot the ranch, and in the summer recognize the irrigated pastures. On the cliff above the rock shelter was a large expanse of exposed rock, with a significant flat-surface area. I’d taken Joseph camping there the summer before to show him the shelter. He’d been impressed with the rock art, the white birds, as Glade and I called them because the pictographs looked like silhouettes of white wings against the sky, and the trapezoid figures that Joseph said looked like guardians. We talked about that as we sat around our campfire on the bluff.
“What makes you think they are guardians?” I’d asked him.
“Their bodies look like shields,” he’d said. “And some of them are holding spears.”
I told Joseph how the Fremonts had lived in the western Colorado Plateau and the eastern Great Basin area for almost a thousand years, flourishing as hunters and gatherers in communities of up to several hundred people. But within a hundred and fifty years, they had disappeared from Utah, and though they had begun showing up in western Colorado, their communities had dwindled down to no more than isolated farmsteads and cliff dwellings large enough to contain four or five families. Then, by 1400 A.D., they had disappeared from Colorado as well. They’d been called the vanishing people, because none of the artifacts from their culture had shown up in any other Native American cultures, meaning it wasn’t likely they’d been assimilated into other groups. Joseph and I were camping in the last area where the Fremonts had lived.
And as Joseph and I sat around the campfire that night, we talked about what might have happened to the family that had lived at this particular site. The ledge that had once sheltered this group appeared as if it had been deliberately made to fall. The edges of the ledge, and the rock face it had been broken from, were sheer. There was no evidence of erosion. “There could have been disease and someone wanted to stop the disease from spreading,” I told Joseph. “The Utes could have come upon the bones and decided to cover them up.”
“Could the Fremonts have starved to death?” Joseph asked.
“It’s possible, but it’s unlikely.” I told him about the middens we’d found and the evidence of a healthy diet. And we’d found granaries with corn.
“What do you think?” Joseph asked.
“I think it was disease or warfare,” I said.
And then we sat quiet for a while longer.
“It’s kind of unsettling,” Joseph said.
“It is.”
“Do you ever get scared out here?”
“No.” I picked up a stick and stoked the fire. I was sitting a few feet from Joseph. “You know, when I first came out here, I really didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I didn’t know what lay ahead for me. I didn’t know I was going to have you. I suppose I was just trying to understand it all. When I’m out here, I feel like I’m as close as I’ll ever be to finding the answers.”
Joseph remained quiet.
“What are you thinking?” I asked him.
“Did you love my dad?”
Joseph had asked this question before, and I’d answered it before, as well. “I thought I loved him,” I said.
“What does that mean?” Joseph’s voice was subdued. He was staring straight ahead at the flames.
“I don’t know,” I said.