I told you this one was dark. If you have got young ones listening, this is your moment to skip ahead a few minutes. I'll wait.
Still here? All right.
In eighteen seventy, on the road between Elizabethtown and Taos — the road we are more or less driving today — there was a cabin. And in that cabin lived a man named Charles Kennedy, with his wife, who was a Ute woman, and their child.
Now, this was gold-rush country. Men were coming over these passes constantly, in all weather, carrying everything they owned, and often carrying gold. And there was almost nowhere to stop. So when a traveller came down that road at dusk in the cold and saw firelight in a cabin window and a man in the doorway offering a hot meal and a place by the fire, that traveller went in. Of course he did. Anybody would.
A great many of them never came out.
Nobody knows the real number. The figures people give run to fourteen or more, and I want to be honest with you that the count is folklore, not a court record. But what is not in doubt is that men went into that cabin and were not seen again, and that the country between here and Taos was where they stopped being seen.
It ended in late eighteen seventy, and it ended because of his wife.
She had lived in that cabin. She had seen it. Whatever her situation was — and a Ute woman married to a violent white man in eighteen seventy New Mexico had very few options and very little protection — she got out, and she got herself into Elizabethtown, into a saloon full of men, bleeding, and she told them. Out loud. In front of everybody. What her husband had been doing to travellers.
That took a kind of courage that I do not have a word for.
They went and got him. He was arrested. And then — because this was E-town in eighteen seventy, and E-town did not have the patience for a trial — a crowd of masked men took him out of custody and hanged him.
The versions of what happened after that get ugly and they get theatrical, and some of them involve the gunfighter Clay Allison and a rope, a horse, and a head on a post. Those are the versions the old ghost-town books love. I'd take them with a good deal of salt; frontier storytellers were never people to leave a horror un-improved.
What I hold onto is the woman. Not the mob. Not Allison. Not Kennedy.
A woman who had every reason to believe nobody would listen to her — wrong race, wrong sex, wrong century — walked into a room full of armed strangers anyway and said the thing out loud.
The cabin is long gone. Nobody agrees on exactly where it stood. But it was somewhere along the miles between here and Taos, off in the trees, and everybody who drove past it thought it looked warm.
Right. That's the darkness done. It gets kinder from here — and where we're going next, it gets remarkable.
Photo: Forest Service - Northern Region · Public domain