I LIVE ON THREE ACRES at the base of the Rocky Mountain foothills in Larimer County, Colorado. It often snows more on these few acres than it does in Fort Collins, just four miles away. When the weather shifts, the wind is fierce, so much so that it has overturned horse trailers and uprooted playsets. Once, I watched from the kitchen window as our wheelbarrow slowly made its way down the driveway and onto the road, as if pushed by a ghost. In the summer, the land is part desert, with dying prairie grasses and prickly pear cacti we boil down to jelly.
Compared with the rugged mountain terrain to the west and the arid prairie to the east, this bit of rolling land a mile or so from the Cache La Poudre River is relatively habitable. By the time white settlers and trappers arrived, Indigenous encampments belonging to the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Utes Nations had been here for millennia. The main road running alongside our house, Overland Trail, was a well-traveled Indigenous route long before the US Army claimed it in the mid-nineteenth century, making it a shortcut off the busy, volatile Oregon Trial. In 1849, a wagon train of Cherokee and white pioneers hoping to cash in on the gold rush extended the trail over the continental divide, and it soon became a major thoroughfare on the Overland Mail and Express Company’s route.
Because rattlesnakes hide in the tall grass, I mow the field behind our house several times a year. One spring, my husband and I set out to remove protruding rocks in hopes of saving the mower’s blade. As we dug, we realized that if we combine our surnames—Hadfield, from the Old English for heathland, field, pasture, open country, and Steensen, from the Dutch steen, stone, son of stone—we would arrive at a name that means something like “field of stone” or “son of field.”
We quit digging, and we now replace the mower’s blade every year.
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When my family of four moved to this land over a decade ago, we had big plans: an enclosed garden to keep the deer and rabbits away; a chicken coop; goats, who would need a fence, a lean-to, and a milking stand; an orchard; a bridge over the canal; a flower garden; and a rope swing. Because of the labor the land requires, I sometimes start to feel that I belong to it, rather than the other way around. This isn’t untrue, but it isn’t the whole truth either.
During our first years here, I wrote odd prose poems, accounts of our own “settling” of the land, infiltrated by the strange language I was finding in pioneer diaries. I’ve held on to a stack of local history books withdrawn from Colorado State University, where I have taught for over a decade. No one has recalled them. I shouldn’t be surprised. I myself have abandoned this project for years at a time.
The closest things are hard to see. And there are other archives besides the library. What if the land, haunted and hallowed, violated and vibrant, is the medium that gathers and preserves the past and makes it legible to us? What if the land itself, not books, not the poet, offers the most complete archive?
A few months ago, while gazing out the window of my studio, I spotted a strange mound covered in dry grass in my neighbor’s sheep pasture. Just beyond, there was another mound, uncovered and bloody. A mountain lion had attacked the sheep the night before, burying one so that it might return the following night for a second meal.
It wasn’t long before my neighbor came looking for her lost sheep, and a few hours later, the district wildlife manager, Jackson Davis, arrived to set a trap, using one of the sheep’s hindlegs as bait. That night I dreamed there was a festival to celebrate the mountain lion’s capture. My house was full of balloons and children in party hats, and though I knew the mountain lion was caged at the base of the hill, I couldn’t seem to get near it. The crowd of revelers was too thick.
As predicted, the lion returned, and early the next morning I found the majestic creature trapped and pacing. I had assumed the cat would be relocated, but as Jackson and his partner strapped the cage to a pulley and lifted it onto their truck, I learned otherwise.
Just a few days prior, reading Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Paiutes, I copied the opening sentences on a notecard and placed it on a windowsill in my studio: “I was born somewhere near 1844, but am not sure of the precise time. I was a very small child when the first white people came into our country. They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since.”
Ansel Watrous, the reluctant author of History of Larimer County, Colorado, published in 1911, claims there are “two legitimate ways of writing history. One is to make a plain, simple statement of fact; the other to clothe the statement in language fitted to appeal to the reader’s imagination.” Rushing to write his history before all the pioneers of the region died off, he chose the former but invited “him who writes the next history of Larimer County to enlarge upon the theme and clothe the facts in literary raiment.”
The facts, though, are ghosts, and ghosts don’t wear clothes.
Two miles from my house, on a hill overlooking the foothills to the west and the valley to the east, there is a settlers’ cemetery. Possibly an earlier Indigenous burial ground, the cemetery holds the remains of white colonists, French-Canadian trappers, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mexican nationals, along with many of their multiracial offspring.
Donaciano Vigil, born in 1842, boasts the largest number of descendants in the cemetery. Vigil is reported as being of Native American, Spanish, French, and Irish descent. But his death records state he was Mexican. In other words, the cemetery is both a palimpsest of the region’s early colonial peoples and an emblem of its uncertain history.
The oldest marked graves are those of Bazille and Mary Provost, children of French trapper John Provost, a “squaw man,” and his wife, White Owl. John purchased White Owl from her brother when she was sixteen, renaming her Mary, after his own mother.
The Provost family, along with 142 other Anglo-Native families, signed the “Half-Breed Petition,” requesting 320 acres of land from the US government for their “Indian relatives and friends exclusively.” The petition was either ignored or denied.
Somewhere around 1872, Mary divorced John, temporarily taking up with another white settler with whom she had at least one child—Ida Stinking Bear, or Ida Little Killer. Mary soon left Ida’s father too and married a third white settler, becoming Mary Jumper. After Wounded Knee, Mary Jumper and her children, along with every other Anglo-Indigenous family in the valley, were rounded up and sent to reservations. Mary Jumper married one final time, to an Indigenous man, becoming Mary Yellow Bear.
Squaw, a word derived from the Algonquin squa, once meant woman. Colonial misuse soon rendered it derogatory. Often it implied property, which was true in Mary’s case, but it is also true that Mary, somewhat paradoxically, found agency by marrying and remarrying.
Naming is, as we all know, a method of control. Renaming, a claiming.
The graveyard is now known as Bingham Hill Cemetery, but between 1942 and 1987 it sat overgrown and all but forgotten. In its earliest years, it carried the name of the nearby town, Laporte, previously Colona, colony.
Laporte, “Behold the door.”
Laporte, “A threshold.”
A word of half-known origin—thresh, to tread or trample; hold, unknown.
At the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, I see:
—–—Folsom knife
—–—Atlatl point embedded in a limb
—–—Beaded moccasin
—–—Burrow holes
—–—Allosaur bone
—–—Bison antiquus bladder, a water carrier
—–—Bone needle, ochre nodule, stingray fossil
How to tell it? I don’t want to pry open the region’s secrets. Instead, I want to listen to the wind’s raging.
Pioneer, frontiersman, mining camp cook, county judge, journalist, Pony Express rider, “Byron of the Rockies,” womanizer, and horse thief, Joaquin Miller claimed to have spent years living in a Modoc village. He either worked to protect the Modoc’s rights to their land, or he was swept up by the greed of the gold rush that displaced them, or both. Passing through the Rocky Mountains, he wrote: “Colorado, rare Colorado! Yonder she rests; her head of gold pillowed on the Rocky Mountains, her feet in the brown grass, the boundless plains for a playground; she is set on a hill before the world, and the air is very clear, so all may see her well.”
Is Colorado an almost perfect rectangle on a map, a woman whose body is a playground, a city on a hill? The air is very clear here, except when forest fires burn near.
“A city on a hill cannot be hidden,” preached Puritan John Winthrop, en route to the New World. Or maybe that was a rumor. There is, in fact, no evidence that the sermon was ever delivered.
And yet, this is the origin story of American exceptionalism. JFK, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama all evoked the image. During the lead-up to the 2016 election, both candidates alluded to it. Trump did so in the negative, warning that should his policies be rejected, America will become “the laughingstock of the world.”
The pilgrims had another way of saying essentially the same thing: “For the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith,” they “plant[ed] the first Colony.” The newcomers could fathom nothing prior to Genesis, the events of which, in their cosmology, dated back just five thousand or so years before their arrival in New England. My ancestor William Brewster, probable author of the Mayflower Compact, established himself as Adam’s heir by inscribing Hebel est omnis Adam on the inside cover of several of his books. Hebel, in Hebrew, is vapor, breath, mist, but biblical translators have often rendered it vanity. Hebel is everything of Adam, of man, runs Brewster’s motto. Though ostensibly a statement of humility before God, it admits what Brewster himself likely would not: The vanity of all vanities is the belief that God gifted Plymouth, the ancestral land of the Patuxet, to his small band of religious radicals.
Nearly three hundred years after Brewster and his children—Jonathan, Patience, Fear, Love, and Wrestling—died off, George McJunkin, an emancipated slave turned ranch foreman, found an ancient kill site near Folsom, New Mexico. No one believed him. But when two white brothers, Roy and Claude Coffin, came across several fluted lance points twenty-eight miles north of Fort Collins, a team of Smithsonian archaeologists quickly arrived, bringing with them a motley crew of pets: a black chow called Punky, an unnamed pelican, and a purple martin dubbed Gog. By the mid-1930s, the team had unearthed what turned out to be the most extensive late–Ice Age campsite yet found, which they named after the landowner at the time, rancher William Lindenmeier.
Like the pilgrims before them, the Coffins situated their discovery within a Judeo-Christian tradition. In his 1937 report, Colorado’s First Settlers, Roy, a geology professor at Colorado State University, proposes that “Northern Colorado may have been the ‘Garden of Eden’ of the Western Hemisphere.”
About halfway between my house and the Lindenmeier Site, a forest of piñon pines grows atop a limestone deposit. No one is certain how these trees arrived this far north. Perhaps nomadic tribes carried piñon seeds from southern regions to trade at nearby meeting sites. Perhaps a piñon seed is an archive.
Piñon charcoal found in fire pits at the site dates back as far as 670 CE. Today, in the center of the piñon forest, there is a deep crevice, a mine. There the Pete Lien & Sons mining company extracts carcinogenic minerals used in the manufacturing of paint and plastic that will long outlive me and my offspring.
If I’ve learned anything from deciduous trees, it is this: Lie low and listen.
In time, I come to see I inhabit the wake of a long wave, lapping, once ocean, once coastal, once volcanic, once glacial, once tidal, once swamp, all written in rock.
As more and more white settlers moved onto Indigenous lands, conflicts along the Overland Trail intensified. The Treaty of Fort Wise, signed by President Lincoln in 1861, established reservations and reduced by close to 90 percent the land promised to tribes just ten years prior. Our three acres, “ceded by treaty,” were part of a larger 160-acre plot “purchased” from the Arapahoe and Cheyenne for sixty-eight cents. The following year, as part of the first Morrill Act, these 160 acres were allocated to the state of South Carolina to be used as seed money for the establishment of two land-grant universities—Clemson and South Carolina State. Proceeds from parcels to the west helped found Colorado State University, my employer.
The small delegate of mostly illiterate Native American chiefs who “cede[d] and relinquish[ed] to the United States all the lands now owned, possessed or claimed by them” did so not with their own signatures but rather by drawing small X’s in the allotted space between their transliterated and translated names.
“The X mark,” says Ojibwe and Dakota writer Scott Lyons, “is a contaminated and coerced sign of consent made under conditions that are not of one’s making. It signifies power and the lack of power, agency and a lack of agency. It is a decision one makes when something has already been decided for you, but it is still a decision.” That is, to see the mark as only a sign of coercion is to erase the hand that made it; it is to grant the X mark the power to X out the presence of indigeneity then and now. A mark is an archive.
Many tribal members refused to leave.
These are the antecedents to the brutal massacre at Sand Creek.
The property surrounding my land now houses CSU’s fourteen-hundred-acre Foot-hills Campus, where a range of climate-related research is conducted: work on water shortages; methane emissions; reintroduction of native bison; solar energy; hurricane and flood mitigation; reforestation; honeybee research; and equine-assisted therapies. In short, the land is used for efforts to mitigate the very effects of the colonization and exploitation that brought it into CSU’s care over 150 years ago.
The acreage is also home to the Infectious Disease Research Center, the Army Reserve National Guard Training Center, the Poudre Fire Authority Training Center, and Christman Airfield, which often serves as a camp and command center for those fighting nearby wildfires.
In 2012, my parents’ house burned in the High Park Fire; eight years later, the state’s largest wildfire on record lit up the foothills behind our house. One day in late October 2020, a printed map from the nearby firefighter’s camp appeared in my backyard, blown in by the same wind that fanned the fire’s flames: Cameron Peak Fire, 207,464 acres, as of 10/23/2020 @ 21:20, 60% contained. That year, the view from our windows included helicopters towing containers of fire retardant over the hills.
East of the runway is a hangar once used by the Forney Aircraft Company. It is here that my father’s first airplane was built, a 1958 F-1 Forney Deluxe. When my father learned to fly, he was just thirteen and hadn’t been anywhere west of Ohio.
My father’s father flew too. As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered: a pilot. The walls of my bedroom were covered in Blue Angels posters. Recently, from my backyard, I watched the Blue Angels perform their “dirty loops” in preparation for an upcoming airshow.
Inherited desire is a kind of family archive.
Even if we have never been there, an expanse of land can draw us back.
On the other side of the irrigation canal separating our parcel from our neighbors’ is a rickety tower and a well that, according to neighborhood lore, served as a nineteenth-century watering station for those traveling along the Overland Trail. In winter, I can see the tower from my studio, but in summer, when the leaves unfurl, it disappears behind a stand of giant cottonwood. On the other side of the tower is a thick patch of pine trees.
During the pandemic, with nowhere to go to escape the prying eyes of their families, my teenage daughter and her boyfriend snuck into my neighbor’s yard, climbed the tower, and took photos of one another on the ladder. Later that evening, my daughter’s post captioned “Trespassing” appeared in my Instagram feed.
To reach the well, I must cross the canal, which is owned by the Pleasant Valley Irrigation Company. Its water source, the Cache la Poudre River, received its current name when a group of French trappers buried a stash of gunpowder along its banks. Previously, the Sioux called the river Minni Luzahan, or “Swift Current.” If the river’s earlier name paid tribute to its own power, its new name celebrates the power of its colonizer. Both the river and its name are ever-evolving archives.
I too longed to escape. Daily, I walked the same dead-end road until my neighbor showed me an overgrown trail leading to CSU’s Foothills property. A portal of sorts, the path led me back to this abandoned project. With all the researchers and employees working remotely, my dogs and I roamed the campus and its wide-open expanses freely.
——Now, on weekends and evenings when the campus is empty, I trespass undetected. On snow days, I cross-country ski.
——I trespass where I work.
——I trespass where I sleep.
——I trespass where I eat.
——My family, my friends, my dogs trespass with me, all invasive beings.
Like our parcel, seized land just south of our house was sold for development. The KKK bought a plot for investment purposes in the early 1920s. CSU’s football stadium found a home here too. That is, until the university demolished it and built a 220-million-dollar stadium on campus, which now obscures the natural light in the fine arts building.
When the old stadium was removed, the Intertribal Alliance demanded the rematriation of the Hughes Stadium property, offering the university the opportunity to repair some of the damage caused by the seizure and development of the land. Tribal members planned to conserve the land, protecting 267 species of native wildlife and 396 species of native plants. Having found evidence of teepee rings and sweat-lodge ceremonies, they also proposed growing traditional Native American medicinal and ceremonial plants to honor the land’s ancient spiritual legacy.
On August 17, 2021, the Alliance sent a letter to CSU’s board of governors, writing: “Recognition and words are not enough to restore the cosmic balance after the systematic displacement, forced assimilation, and genocide of the Native and Indigenous Nations and Peoples of this continent.” CSU’s land acknowledgement statement asserts otherwise:
Colorado State University acknowledges, with respect, that the land we are on today is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations and peoples. This was also a site of trade, gathering, and healing for numerous other Native tribes. We recognize the Indigenous peoples as original stewards of this land and all the relatives within it. As these words of acknowledgment are spoken and heard, the ties Nations have to their traditional homelands are renewed and reaffirmed.
Words are enough, the university claims. A few months after receiving the Alliance’s letter, CSU sold the land to the City of Fort Collins for 12.5 million dollars.
It is not lost on me that I too have turned to words. As Paisley Rekdal admits in West: “I am empire’s scribe.”
Several summers ago, my husband used a shovel to decapitate a baby rattler in our own doorway. In Indian Vedic texts we find the story of an astronomer leading a mason to the exact place where he is to lay his cornerstone, underneath which a primordial snake lies. When the mason’s stake penetrates the ground, the snake is decapitated, obliterating chaos, bringing form into the world. If a house is an archive, so is a snake.
Regardless of how much we mow, every summer we find rattlers sunning themselves on the concrete walkway leading to our front door. They belong here. In some ways, we do too, but mostly, we don’t. If there is an archive whose wisdom leads to unknowing and unowning, it belongs to the land.
Sasha Steensen is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Everything Awake (Shearsman) and Well (Parlor). She also writes long-form essays, excerpts of which have been published in Tupelo Quarterly and Interim. She teaches undergraduate and graduate literature and creative writing at Colorado State University. www.sashasteensen.com
Image: Drew Hastings. Unsplash, 2023.
