Henrietta Hay's Column

History is not an exact science. Oral history is even more in the realm of fantasy. Columnists are not held to the same standard of accuracy as reporters, but when we goof, we do hear about it.

Last month I wrote about my weekend at X Lazy F Ranch. The ranch manager took my friend Terry and me on a ride across Black Mesa, including a visit the Billy Knott ranch down on the south end. There is a ranch, and it is on the Black Mesa and it is very beautiful, but beyond those facts, my column was not entirely accurate. My telephone rang off the hook the night that column appeared. There are lots of people left on the Western Slope who remember the early history of the Black Mesa.

One of the callers was Bill Knott himself, who did not homestead in 1914, but who did grow up on the ranch. It was his father Fred who was the original homesteader. Bill is very much alive and well and living in Paonia. I even misspelled the name Knott.

Today the ranch is still there, but there is little left but grass to tell its story. The big barn is a skeleton that lets the snow and rain and sunshine come through. There is rusting farm machinery and the remains of a couple of cabins.

According to Bill, back in 1914 Fred Knott met an old guy in Curecanti who told him about some very fine farmland on Black Mesa that had just been opened to homesteading. Fred looked at it and filed on it. Ranchers had been running cattle on the land and did not greet him with open arms. As I remember my western history, range wars were second only to water wars in those days. Fred knew a good thing when he saw it, however, and spent the first two winters up there in a tent. Later he built two cabins and the big barn. Fred and his family worked the ranch for thirty years, living there winter and summer. Oh yes, he and the other ranchers became friends.

The story about Fred snowshoeing down to Sapinero with a five-gallon can of cream strapped to his back is apocryphal but I like it. He could have sold it for ice cream. He did go to Sapinero every week or so for supplies, but he probably carried cheese instead of cream. The road was closed in the winter and there is some difference of opinion as to whether he skied or went on snowshoes. However he did it, it was a tough 17 or 18 miles jaunt each way, and going home it was all up hill.

Every now and then the long arm of coincidence reaches around and taps me on the shoulder. I grew up in Englewood, but my dad loved to fish on the Gunnison. Nearly every summer we climbed into the old Hudson (before that it was an Essex) and drove to the Western Slope. One of the fishing camps that we stayed in was the one in Sapinero.

After the Black Mesa column I got a phone call from a woman who grew up in that very fishing camp, which her parents owned. I wonder whether things like that happen to Dave Barry. This caller remembers Fred snowshoeing down the Black Mesa road, but with no cream on his back. She also told me about Sapinero before it ended up on the bottom of the Blue Mesa Reservoir.

It was hardly a metropolis even then. She thinks the population count might have gotten up to 60 some years. The highest number that ever went to grade school at once was 28.

She says that there really was a fishing camp. "Up the road" from it was the Sapinero Hotel, which had a wonderful cook and served three big meals a day. It was attached to the Sapinero Mercantile where Fred Knott probably sold his cheese and got his supplies. "Across the road" was the Carpenter Hotel for a little while, and "up the road" some more was the train depot, which brought most of the fishing people in. And somewhere beyond that was the grade school. And that was it!

One of the great things about writing this column is that I keep learning first hand how very small the world really is. And I keep hearing from people who help me stay connected to the present and, occasionally, to the past.