by Pam Houston
I plug the space heater into the one remaining plug in that part of the barn and set it on my lap facing outward. Martina and Sheryl Crow come and tuck themselves in, one under each armpit. The Icelandics too are happy to see me these mornings. Jordan and her twins, Queenie and Natasha, come inside the inner part of the enclosure, an area they usually leave to the chickens, and hunker down into the wood shavings with me. With the glow of the heat lamps and the warmth of the heater, the animals all clustered around and breathing contentedly, it is hard not to think of Mary, all those years ago, and the manger, though I was raised Episcopalian and have since become something I loosely refer to as Buddhist-Druidic, and therefore it’s rare I think of Mary for any reason at all.
One morning, when I had lost all feeling in my fingers and toes and went back inside where Greg—home for Christmas break—was making me one of his delicious lattes, I said, “I can kinda see now why Mary wanted to give birth in a barn.”
“She didn’t want to give birth in a barn, Pam,” he said. “There was no room in the inn.”
“I know that’s how the story goes,” I said. “But I bet she was secretly glad.”
Ranch Archive
On the top of the hill in the middle of my pasture there is a chain-link fence surrounding the graves of John Robert, Bob and Ada Pinckley. When I bought the ranch I signed a piece of paper saying their relatives were allowed access to the little cemetery into perpetuity, but in the twenty-five years I have lived here, no one has ever come by. I make it a point to come up here at least once a month myself, to bring a fistful of wildflowers, to sit still for ten minutes, to say a whispered thank-you to the man who saw this meadow and thought, This is a place a person could make a life.
I am not a researcher at heart. I don’t have anything against libraries, except that they are indoors, but my writing rises more often from tactile experience than it does from anything I’ve read in books. But there are a lot of ways to know a piece of ground and one is to learn what happened here long before I set eyes on the place. So I put my rudimentary researching skills to work to see what I can find.
For my twentieth anniversary at the ranch, Dona Blair sends me a small box labeled “ranch stuff.” The largest item in the box is the ranch’s Abstract of Title—the original one from 1916. It rolls into a scroll and has a sky blue linen cover. The heavily serifed black lettering on the blue linen proclaims the document as:
Abstract of Title [the capitalization is theirs]: SOUTH HALF of the SOUTHWEST QUARTER of Section EIGHT; The NORTHEAST QUARTER of the NORTHWEST QUARTER; the EAST HALF of the SOUTHEAST QUARTER of the NORTHWEST QUARTER; and the EAST HALF of the NORTHEAST QUARTER of the SOUTHWEST QUARTER of Section SEVENTEEN, ALL in Township FORTY North, Range ONE West, New Mexico Principal Meridian.
It is sealed with an embossed gold eagle.
When I open to the first page of the scroll I find out that at 1:20 p.m. on February 11, 1916, the United States of America, by the power of President Woodrow Wilson, conveyed to the Heirs of John R. Pinckley this land (and here it lists all of those halves and quarters again), with patent number 494,126. Just below the release of patent is a notification that on February 8, 1915, at 4:40 p.m., the United States Land Office, received, from the Heirs of John Robert Pinckley, payment in full for those acres. There is no mention of what the payment was.
Below those two notifications, under an embossed number 3, is a record of one George Gerard mortgaging these same acres to Rolf H. Locklin back on November 24, 1905, at 1:45 p.m. The note was for $200 and was due in ninety days; interest at 12 percent. Below that there is a release of the same mortgage, on September 7, 1907, at 2:20 p.m.
Twenty-nine years later, the scroll tells me, in 1944, Robert Pinckley (son of John Robert) sells one-quarter interest in the ranch to Don C. LaFont for $400. This is how the ranch shrunk from the original 160-acre homestead to the 120 acres it is now.
The next page tells me that in 1946, the District Court of the United States:
HEREBY ORDERED ADJUDGED AND DECREED that all rights in and to a proposed reservoir on public lands of the United States in Mineral County embracing a total area of 4,493 acres, more or less, be and hereby are forfeited for nought, and that all right, title and interest of the defendants herein be and hereby are vacated, cancelled and held for nought. That the title to the land described in said map to be used for said reservoir be and hereby is forever quieted and confirmed in plaintiff as against any claim of right, title or interest in or to said reservoir rights. That the defendants and all other persons be and hereby are enjoined and restrained from asserting any right, title, or interest in and to said reservoir rights, and be and hereby are enjoined and restrained from constructing any reservoir on said lands.
I don’t know what proposed reservoir they are referring to here. The Rio Grande Reservoir, roughly forty miles upriver from me, was built between 1910 and 1914, thirty years before this decree. It could be the Goose Lake Reservoir, which is about fifteen miles up Ivy Creek in the opposite direction. Or perhaps it was a reservoir that was proposed but never built. In any case, the federal government wanted Bob Pinckley to know he was not entitled to any of that water, even if some of it ran across his ranch.
The document goes on to record tax payments in some years and not others, and to reaffirm several times that the owner of the 120 acres has no water rights at all. In 1960, two years before I was born, the record notes that Robert Pinckley signed a contract with the San Luis Valley Rural Electric Cooperative to have electricity brought to the ranch. In 1966, John LaFont was notified that Robert Pinckley had not paid his taxes in 1936. The bill was $17.44, plus interest, which John LaFont paid. Also in 1966, Myrtle LaFont and May Oates (the other heirs of John R. Pinckley) turned their stake in the ranch over to John LaFont via a quitclaim deed for which he paid each of them one dollar. John LaFont continued to pay the taxes on the ranch up until 1969, which is when the record appears to run out. The year after that, John LaFont sold the property for $25,000 to Dona Blair and her late husband, Robert Blair, because John had his own place closer to town and couldn’t afford the taxes on both properties.
The next item I pull out of the box is a bill from Dr. Wm. O. Whitaker to Robert Pinckley for $14 dated March 11, 1940. The bill is handwritten with a pen. Under a column labeled “Professional services” words are scrawled that appear to be “deduct horns.” And then, at the bottom, “This bill has run quite a while so please remit.”
There is another letter, addressed to “Mr. Robert Pinckley, Creede, Colorado,” containing a request for official right-of-way for the county road that splits the property. It is postmarked March 23, 1958, at 5:30 p.m. I find myself unduly moved by the record of the exact time of day. When I run my hand over the address I can feel the indentations left by the keys of a typewriter. The hand-cancelled stamp on the letter cost three cents.
There is a letter from John LaFont to Robert and Dona Blair dated October 11, 1970, also handwritten in pen.
Dear Folks,
I have been intending to answer your letter for several weeks but since writing letters is not my favorite pastime that should explain the long lapse in the time. I am very grateful that you folks are going to be the owners of the Pinckley property. It is rather sad to see the old place go as it holds a heap of sentimentality for over 50 years. But I trust it is going to be in good hands. I plan on leaving that old mowing machine and several old items in the cabin.
As to the condition of the cabin. Bob Pinckley lived in it winter and summer year around until he died there in June, 1966, so it is not too uncomfortable. However some new glass needs to be put in the south window which was broken out by trespassers a couple of years ago. I believe that posting the property (within reason) would be a good idea. I will check on the place for you occasionally. As it is a little way off, my visits will probably be infrequent. But at least people will realize that it is being looked after to a degree. The probabilities are that we could find you a place to store
some tools and other articles around here somewhere.
Now to clarify the ranch situation—especially Grandmother Pinckley. Grandmother Pinckley (my mom’s mother) died from complications following childbirth (twins) in November 1906 in Creede. Her remains were shipped to Longmont, Colorado for burial. Three or four years after her passing Grandpa Pinckley filed on the homestead and moved on to it in a tent. My Dad helped him build the two little cabins and the old log barn down by the mowing machine. There were Bob, Hazel, and Ada at home at that time. The little twin girls were adopted out while they were infants and my mother was already married and in a home of her own. Anyway, Grandpa Pinckley died in June 1913 before he got the ranch proved up on so my mother (Myrtle) moved up on the place and proved up on it and got it patented.
Someday we will have a chance to visit, (I hope) and I can fill you in on different things. It would be a lot easier than trying to write it. The three graves are Grandpa (John R. Pinckley) Ada, the next to the youngest daughter, and Uncle J Robert Pinckley (Bob, my uncle).
My wife joins me in wishing you good luck on the place. She is recuperating pretty well now at home after 15 days in the Del Norte Hospital. She had quite a siege of asthmatic bronchitis, staff infection [sic], and an allergic flare up from penicillin.
Let us hear from you occasionally and I’ll try to answer earlier.
Sincerely,
John LaFont
There is nothing else in the box—a few tiny puzzle pieces I try to connect to form a hundred years of ranch history before I came along. I’m glad to have the relationships between the LaFonts and the Pinckleys explicated: Bob’s sister Myrtle married Don LaFont and gave birth to John LaFont, who looked after Bob in his old age. It’s nice to picture the ranch before electricity, and when the county road was nothing but a dirt trace. But the detail the box revealed that makes me happier than all the others is the one about Myrtle: in spite of the county record giving the credit to her father, it was actually a young woman who proved up on the place, who did the physical work of satisfying the claim and earning the homestead. I picture her out here, with a saw in her hand, a pile of fence poles at her feet and her hair tied up in a gingham kerchief. I vow to name the next female resident of the ranch of any species Myrtle.
A quick internet search reveals that the very same John LaFont who tended Bob Pinckley in his old age, who made it possible for him to live out his years, die and be buried on the ranch, and who claimed to struggle writing a one-page letter to Dona Blair, actually wrote two whole books: The Homesteaders of the Upper Rio Grande and 58 Years Around Creede, both published in 1971. John’s father, Don C. LaFont—the one who bought those forty acres behind my back fence from Bob Pinckley—also wrote a book, Rugged Life in the Rockies, which had been published twenty years earlier. I find signed first editions (and only signed first editions) of all three books on Alibris and order them, pleased to know I am not the first, nor even the second writer to walk the fence line of the ranch, composing paragraphs.
Rugged Life was published by Prairie Publishing Company in Casper, Wyoming, Homesteaders by Oxmoor Press in Birmingham, Alabama, and 58 Years simply says, “privately printed” in the place where the publishing information usually goes.
“The procedures for homesteading,” writes LaFont in Homesteaders, “were to take out the boundaries of the tract of land you were desirous of, then locate it in its proper range, township and section number. This way a legal description could be established and the property could be mapped.” “Proving up” on the land included everything from constructing a residence of some kind (a homesteader had to live on the claim for at least six months each year) to plowing a specific amount of ground for cultivation, “grubbing off a specific area of willow or brush, or clearing off a set sized patch of timber.” It was possible to be awarded a patent in as few as three years, but you could also string the improvements out for five years without reneging. There was a filing fee of three dollars and a patent fee of ten dollars and if the county was satisfied you had proved up adequately, the land was yours. If you were into “homestead flipping,” the going rate on a newly patented 160 acres was $1,000. The first homestead in the Upper Rio Grande Valley was patented in 1880 and the last in 1930.
Of the 203 homesteaders who settled the Upper Rio Grande Valley in the late 1800s and early 1900s—from the Old Riverside Ranch, about thirty-five miles downriver from me, to Pearl Lakes, about thirty-five miles upriver and very near the headwaters—25 were women. As of the publication of Homesteaders in 1971, only 5 of those 203 homesteaders were left alive and 3 of those were women. The only person who had been alive at the time the claim was filed and still lived on the ranch that constituted the original homestead was Bob Pinckley’s next-door neighbor (and mine), Emma Soward McCrone. In 1971, when John LaFont told Emma McCrone that she was the only one of the 203 homesteaders left on her ranch, she said she must have been “too damn dumb” to be convinced you couldn’t survive on a homestead.
Emma McCrone lived out her days on the 1,200-acre Soward Ranch (we share a long fence)—and her daughter Margaret McCrone Lamb—born on the ranch in 1919—died in March 2015. Margaret spent four years of college at the University of Denver, and a handful of recent winters in the town of Creede, but all my memories of her are sitting at her kitchen table at the Soward Ranch, telling stories of the old days in Antelope Park.
“Well of course the ranch is my whole life,” Margaret said in an interview she did for a book called Women of the Upper Rio Grande: Beartown to Creede, Memories from 1920 Through 1960, published in 2011. “You know I’ll have people say to me in town like in the spring, are you going to the ranch this summer? Are you nuts? It is just so much a part of me. And I guess you know like when I was in the hospital that two months, the guests and the girls who worked for me told me it’s just not the same when you’re not there. They are used to me being here as a stable thing you know, and that is nice to know because the ranch is me and I am the ranch.”
Margaret’s obituary from the weekly Creede Miner calls her “a self-described eternal optimist.” Her father had been the postmaster of Creede and she took over that position after he died. She was the secretary of the school board for more than twenty years.
Of all the landmarks around here, Margaret loved the cliff called Bristol Head best. “I just sometimes look at it and think, ‘You know, what are my problems?’ It’s been there a million years probably looking up at the sky.”
There is a disappointing dearth of information about my ranch in John LaFont’s books, considering how much time he spent out here, keeping Bob company, but the book does confirm what my Abstract of Title suggested, that “the old Pinckley place” was first filed on by a man named George William Gerard, who was a dentist in Creede at the time. Gerard failed to prove up on it, so it went back to the government, and John Robert Pinckley filed on it. When John died it was left to all his heirs, but it was young Robert (LaFont’s Uncle Bob) who fell in love with it, and lived on it for the next sixty years.
Also in Homesteaders, I find out about Lambert Fewell, known as Shorty by all the old-timers, who homesteaded 160 acres where the Antelope warm springs were located. I live right in the center of Antelope Park, and the only warm springs I know about are in Seepage Creek, across the river. It’s possible the Antelope warm springs have dried up in the intervening years, or they may just be on private property. In any case, according to LaFont, Shorty Fewell worked for a man named Sylvester who had bought up a lot of bottomland in Antelope Park because he wanted to construct the Vega Sylvester Reservoir (this could be the reservoir the Abstract of Title was worrying about). He managed to buy the whole of the river bottom except for the Soward Ranch, and had even talked Dan Soward (Emma McCrone’s dad) into selling the land by bringing him a whole suitcase of gold coins, but Dan’s wife, Ellen (Emma’s mother), refused to let him take the gold, and in the words of John LaFont, “saved Antelope Park from becoming a dried up mud hole.”
T
he first time I read about the Vega Sylvester Reservoir, my stomach plunges, as if it still might be about to happen.
The three LaFont books teach me a lot about Creede and the Upper Rio Grande Valley, but not so much about the Pinckleys, so my next stop is the Creede Historical Society and the database for The Creede Candle, Creede’s newspaper from 1892 to 1930. My search yields exactly five entries:
January 29, 1910
Vol. XIX
Creede
Wednesday afternoon at 2 o’clock sharp, the marriage ceremony was performed by Justice of the Peace John F. Lees, at the bride’s home at Sunnyside, joining in wedlock Miss Myrtle Agnes Pinckley to Mr. Don C. LaFont. C.P. Eades and Quincy Neal were the signing witnesses.
After the ceremony a fine bridal dinner was served to which the following did full justice to the good things to eat: Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Neal; Quincy Neal; Mr. and Mrs. A.G. Petitt and Miss Leonore Petitt; Messrs. Charles Eades, Frank Carl, John Pinckley, and the Misses Ada and Hazel Pinckley and Master Bob Pinckley
The guests dispersed in the evening, wishing the happy bride and groom the utmost of the good things of life in which wish we desire to join.
April 30, 1910
Vol. XIX
In the County Court
County Judge C.Y. Butler held a regular session of the County Court last Saturday, and heard the divorce case of Maude May Pinckley2 vs. John R. Pinckley, wherein the plaintiff asked for an absolute divorce, with custody of the child. The defendant was represented by Attorney J.D. Pilcher, but was not present, for some unknown reason. The case, though tried before a jury, was of such a spicy and racy nature, that the Judge decided to hear it behind closed doors, and we and everyone else, were chased out. After hearing the evidence, the jury gave the plaintiff a divorce and also gave her custody of the child.
