Redeye (31 page)

Cobb Pittman
was revealed—in a book published in 1922 by Terrance Meacham called
The Lives of the Last Bounty Hunters—
to be the man who, along with Calvin Boyle and Christian Boyle, carried white flags into the immigrants' corral at Mountain Meadows in 1857. Twenty-two years old at that time, his real name was Jacob Bailey Lawrence. Meacham reveals that Lawrence (a.k.a. Pittman) committed suicide in Salt Lake City in 1907.

Libby Merriwether
studied Indian weaving in her spare time and discovered a link between Mescadey and Eskimo weavings.

Mudfoot (Oiewjo Efintarna)
became chief of the Colorado Mescadey
Indian tribe. He later worked for the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, from which he was fired for insubordination.

Lobo (Duwinec Toe Naiehn)
became a tourist guide in Yellowstone National Park, and then at Mesa Largo National Park.

William “Billy” Blankenship
ran unsuccessfully for the governorship of Colorado in 1904, successfully for the United States Senate in 1906. He sold his interest in the tourist company at that time, and after retiring from the Senate under questionable circumstances in 1912, he opened Colorado's first automobile dealership in Denver, Colorado.

P.J. Copeland
discovered a cure for a rare skin disease. The discovery was accidental—a consequence of a skin application for corpses that he invented—but it made him and his family wealthy. He remained in Mumford Rock and joined his adopted son in business. The skin application was called Tree Balm.

Grandma Copeland
gained a limited ability to speak before one afternoon in late summer, at the age of ninety-four, she died at her stove.

Ann Copeland
started the first successful florist business in Colorado.

Brother (Durant) Copeland
was a guide for the Blankenship-Merriwether Tourist Company, then became an attorney and worked for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah, Washington, D.C., and Mumford Rock, Colorado.

Sister (Mary Ann) Copeland
became a nurse and served in the Spanish-American War.

Hiram Thorpe
died of typhoid in 1914, but not before researching the Mountain Meadows Massacre and revealing his father's part in that event to Jack London. London went on to write an account of the massacre and various other events in his 1915 novel,
The Star Rover.

Andrew Collier
returned to England and died in London of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. His book,
The Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Largo,
was published posthumously by his father.

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Also by Clyde Edgerton

Raney

Walking Across Egypt

The Floatplane Notebooks

Killer Diller

In Memory of Junior

Solo: My Adventures in the Air

Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 1995 by Clyde Edgerton. All rights reserved.
Map Illustration by Pamela Marsh.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The author wishes to express his appreciation to Frank McNitt, the Benjamin Weatherill family, Gustaf. Nordenskjiold and family, the National Park Service at Mesa Verde, Colorado, the Ute Nation, the citizens of Mancos, Colorado, Buster Quin, David Harrell, Ivan Denton, Juanita Brooks, Vic Miller, Gordon McGirt, Mark Higgins, and George “G.W.” Terrl.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-819-4