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CHAPTER 1

Identities

Sticky notes in a rainbow of colors and pens were passed around at a town hall-style meeting. Montrose residents used the humble office supplies to jot down comments on plans that business leaders hoped would bring new energy to a small community that, like so many across America, had been exhausted by the Great Recession. Its Main Street was in such tatters that Montrose residents grumbled they had to go to the next town to find a shoe repair shop.

It was 2011. Leading entrepreneurs were convened as the board of directors of the Montrose Downtown Development Authority. They were searching for something that could enliven the kinds of brochures you find on the racks at tourism centers, go viral on social media or catch the eye of a potential angel scanning a prospectus.

They invited their neighbors to brainstorm about links to the romantic Wild West that might appeal to the nostalgic. Maybe foodies would be drawn by a campaign around the fresh produce featured at the weekly farmers market.

Montrose was too far from the interstate to present itself as a potential manufacturing hub, though it does have a candy factory attached to a supersized store that is a sweet tooth's dream. Maybe the key was to portray the town as a gateway to escaping urban crowds and seizing outdoor adventure.

One Downtown Development Authority board member, Melanie Kline, had scoured the Internet for background on famous people who haled from Montrose. She found information on such luminaries as Dalton Trumbo, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who a few years after Kline was researching him became the subject of a movie starring Bryan Cranston about the blacklisted Hollywood 10.

Trumbo's link to Montrose illustrates an aspect of this rugged, rancher, Republican country I would come to understand more deeply with each visit: it is a rich resource of sometimes unexpected talents, skills and points of view.

Still, while Trumbo may have been born in Montrose, he left with his family in 1908, when he was only three years old. He had been a southern Californian for decades by the time he was making a name for himself as a writer.

Kline's neighbors were unimpressed with the ideas they were hearing at the meeting. Those no-nonsense citizens weren't looking for Hollywood glitz. They prided themselves on a rough, pioneering authenticity.

Their town's original 320-acre site was laid out by D.D. Loutsenhizer and Joseph Selig in 1882. The former had been a member of the infamous Alfred Packer expedition that passed through the region in 1873. Loutsenhizer had the sense to question Packer's guiding ability and split off before the party found itself snowbound in the high mountains during winter. Packer dined on the men he had been leading in an episode of cannibalism that has fascinated chroniclers and even inspired a movie musical.

Loutsenhizer and Selig originally called their town Pomona, a Spanish name for a Roman goddess of orchards. The reference was aspirational for a region that would not become known for its agricultural bounty until the early 20th century brought a major irrigation project. Town lore credits Selig for the name change to something that, while sounding more prosaic, actually had literary pretensions. The new name came from a character in Sir Walter Scott's novel A Legend of Montrose, a stirring tale of love and war set in 17th century Scotland. Selig, who died in 1886 at the age of 36 from stomach cancer before he could see what Montrose would become, was evidently a Scott fan.

In the early days, mules would winter in Montrose after spending the bulk of the year helping men work the silver and gold mines in the surrounding hills. Ranchers headed to the train depot drove cattle through the main streets, kicking up dust, noise and the pungent-sweet aroma of manure. At the depot, the beasts were loaded into cars to be taken to market. It is an image, like the profile of a Native American in a feather headdress gracing a wall to greet visitors at Montrose High School that brings to mind the cherished, gritty icons that have shaped the idea we have of ourselves as Americans.

For centuries, the region where Montrose would develop into a town "was a land known only to the Ute Indians and a handful of white men who ventured within its borders," local historian Elaine Hale Jones wrote in Many Faces, Many Visions: The Story of Montrose, Colorado.

Jones recounts that "following much publicity about the removal of the Utes from the Uncompahgre Valley in 1881, this isolated area now open for settlement held a type of mystique for people seeking new opportunities and adventure 'Out West.'"

"Removal of the Utes" is a sterile phrase for a bloody and protracted chapter of American history. The tendency to gloss over the subjugation is reinforced in articles like one I saw in the local newspaper. The Montrose Daily Press told readers in the summer of 2015 about the upcoming family reunion of the descendants of a town pioneer. The story quoted so engagingly from his unpublished autobiography that I sought out the manuscript in the main library, an example of sleek modern architecture that contrasted with that of the traditional courthouse nearby.

In the library I found a photocopy of a closely typed pamphlet bound with tape and cardboard and, according to a hand-scrawled note, written in 1940. The publication date was given only as 19 followed by two question marks. It was grandly titled: Passing of the Two-Gun Era: Memoirs of the late Alva W. Galloway, Cowboy, Rancher, County Official and Businessman.

Galloway wrote that he had been working for a newspaper in the southern Colorado town of Pueblo when an uncle persuaded him he could find his fortune farther west. He arrived six weeks after Montrose's incorporation papers were filed. He wasn't the only dream-chaser.

There were young men "seeking work in the mines, little co-ed graduates of the East just landing in the big open West seeking a job as school teachers and eventually landing a good-looking cow puncher in marriage and growing up with the country," Galloway wrote.

"Montrose wasn't much for looks," he added. "But, boy, there were things doing that you had no idea of. One could at anytime of day or night strike a $5.00-ante poker game or over at the hotel meet all kinds of mine promoters just returning from the east with pockets of money gleaned from the poor suckers who wanted to own a gold mine and suddenly become rich."

He concluded his reminiscences with a description of a 1924 U.S. Senate election. I was startled to find an almost casual reference to the Ku Klux Klan. I should not have been surprised. The Klan, by exploiting prejudices and appealing to a narrow vision of what it meant to be American, had spread into America's southwest from the south following the Civil War. The KKK dominated Colorado politics in the 1920s, stoking resentment and fear of Hispanics, Catholics and Jews as well as blacks. Galloway wrote that during that 1924 political race, Klansmen swept around town in a silent, menacing campaign against the local favorite for Senate. They even went into churches.

"When these boys, sheathed in long white shrouds with slitted holes in the hood for eyesight, long white gloves covering the hands, entered the place of worship, everything folded up in the beat of an eyelash, the atmosphere took on a ghostified eery feeling, a sensation often felt in the presence of the dead."

Galloway linked the Klansmen to one death and to threats against a resident known only as "colored Bob," but gave no details.

In 1862, the passage of the national Homestead Act had helped speed settlement of areas that would become the states of Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming and other states. The act offered land to adult heads of household who had never taken up arms against the United States and could pay a small filing fee, build a home and farm and endure for five years. Freed slaves and women were as entitled to land as white men. War was liberating African-Americans. And creating widows.

The rise of the Klan showed that that offer of opportunity to black Americans enshrined in the Homestead Act had not set well with all their fellow countrymen. There's little evidence many blacks ever joined "colored Bob" in inhospitable territory. According to the U.S. Census estimate for 2013, most people in Montrose are, as Galloway was, white. White's make up 86 percent of the population. I've seen a visit by a national veterans' group exponentially increase, for a day or two at least, the number of African-Americans in town.

By some time in the 2040s, demographers say, Latinos, blacks and other minorities will together comprise the majority of Americans. In Montrose, where Hispanics comprise about 20 percent of the population now, any shift could be influenced by those who answer the call that townspeople have put out to veterans. Demographics are changing in America's armed forces, which were segregated until 1948 and in which advancement has often been denied to minorities. Between 1990 and 2011, according to Pew researchers, the percentage of racial minorities among officers and enlisted personnel increased from about a quarter to about a third. Whites are just over 70 percent of the military, less than their 77 percent of the general population. Blacks are 17 percent of all servicemen and women, while they are only 13.5 percent of all Americans.

America's experience of race relations gives little reason to hope the coming change will be smooth. The past can be instructive. But not if we only take note of the exceptional chapters. If we accept that in places like Montrose the current racial profile was the result of considered action in the past, perhaps we can be more considered about our own reactions as our world changes.

The Daily Press had left out the KKK in its article about a family gathering that had prompted me to seek out Galloways's memoirs. My own initial response when I read of the hooded racists rampaging through the region was to recoil from something that did not fit my stereotype of the West. I had to return to the library a day later to take proper notes on Galloway's final passages.

Galloway was an old newspaperman who knew it was crucial to give a fair and balanced accounting, to record the dark along with the romantic. He documented that America has been multicultural since its earliest days, and that the struggle for equal treatment and true democracy is a work in progress. No wonder we so often backslide into bitter conflict over narrow interests. We're still perfecting our union, even as we venture into the world to build the nations of others.

In the 19th century victory in the Mexican War vastly and with seeming suddenness enlarged the United States and sharpened the internal struggle for dominance between northern and southern states. The North refused to extend slavery to the new national holdings, the swaths of desert and mountains that would become Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, California and parts of Colorado. The calls for secession made during that debate over slavery were calmed by compromise, but not for long. Southerners stalled efforts to settle the west and thereby increase the number and influence of free states.

During the Civil War southern lawmakers abandoned their seats in Washington to don grey uniforms at home, taking with them opposition to legislation designed to develop the West. In 1862, the passage of the Homestead Act helped speed settlement of the West. When Civil War at last came to an end in 1865, development accelerated. "Utes must go" was a political rallying cry the year Colorado became the 38th state, 1876.

The river that runs through Montrose is the Uncompahgre, the name of a Ute clan. The Utes, who pride themselves on being the oldest residents of Colorado, remember the earliest whites to arrive, the Spanish in the 16th century, for bringing new tools and livestock, including horses that allowed them to hunt buffalo; for bringing small pox and cholera; for bringing a fierce and violent competition for land. As the 19th century drew to a close, more and more clashes erupted between whites and Utes.

In 2015, legislators in Denver considered requiring schools in the state with Native American mascots to seek permission from tribes if they wanted to continue using images like the black-and- white-on-red face of an Indian in a feathered headdress that adorns the Montrose High School building. Tribespeople, some tearfully, testified before lawmakers in Colorado's Capitol about the pain of seeing such stereotypes. But the proposal failed, which made sense to people in the Montrose area like a broadcaster who opined online that even if some might call him insensitive, "I would have to argue that Redskins, Braves, Chiefs, or any other Indian moniker is not any more disrespectful to native Americans than Cowboys, Vikings, Titans, Patriots, or Packers are to the respective groups of people their name represents."

It's strong, this temptation to discount the power of the past to shape the present and the future. To discount history. Or drive right by it.

Most cars roar past a cornfield, farmhouse, RV and trailer repair shop and a billboard-sized placard on the outskirts of Montrose on the main road heading into the mountains. I stopped once for a closer look and found the sign is not advertising. It was a page from history in white letters on fading brick-red paint erected by the State Historical Society. It identifies the roadside spot as the site of Fort Crawford, built in the 1880s. Later, I run across a photograph in a book by a local historian showing Fort Crawford in the 19th century. The sharp black-and-white image is dominated by what looks like a farm house with a comfortable front porch and several other buildings on a dirt field that is, perhaps, a parade ground. I learn from the caption that the farm house is a guard house, and that the fort also had a hospital and a bakery. The cantonment was, I read, established to "keep the Indians from going on the warpath."

Until the global war on terror reached its first decade and kept going, the Vietnam War was often referred to as America's longest war. But according to Veterans Affairs our Indian Wars lasted eight decades. The fighting may have been sporadic from 1817 to 1898, and many Americans may have claimed ignorance of what was happening to the continent's indigenous people. But that does not make the story less brutal.

Americans don't like to think of ourselves as warlike, a term usually reserved for our enemies. Who wants to read history as some multi-count indictment? But what if never accounting for the crimes means never truly assessing the limits of power? We don't like to contemplate the costs others bear for our successes, let alone the way violence can haunt even the winner. But leaving out that part of the story also leaves out the lessons that survival, renewal and resilience can offer. The history we forget leaves its marks.

A small town, any town, has a secret history you have to dig to see and work to understand. Violence and broken promises are part of the American story and of the Montrose story. We don't have to gloss over hard truths to draw something from a story. We're on shaky ground when we see the past as cliché. We need to build the future on a firm foundation.

The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria, was educated in the United States and has written about both countries. She once said in an oft-shared TED talk: "Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity."

Adichie lamented that the single story often told of her own country and continent is a negative one. I propose that the single story of America we're used to reading makes the work of creating peace and prosperity, community and common purpose seem simple, a matter of a determined people, destiny and a few other details. Focusing only on the winners leaves us without the language or the resources to cope with change. Forgetting hobbles us.

Sally Johnson, who presides over Montrose's municipal museum, doesn't lock history up in her glass cases. She leads walking tours to the cemetery where pioneer families once gathered for Memorial Day picnics, or through the streets of the old brothel district. Of the latter, she said: "We had a fort outside town. Those soldiers had to have something."

Johnson's bifocals and long, graying hair are a teacherly cover for her impish humor. She does, as it turned out, occasionally fill in as a substitute teacher in Montrose schools. She prefers engaging with younger children over taking on a high school classroom, where she says there's often little to do but sit up front watching teens do their homework or play with their cell phones. She takes the same hands-on attitude to her work at the museum. When a longtime Montrose resident dies and his or her papers end up at the museum, Johnson has to back off and let her volunteers go through the letters, diaries and property deeds. If the director were to start reading, she might not stop for hours.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Home of the Brave"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Donna Bryson.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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