On the morning of October 3rd, 1879, Rogers Crowley left his farmhouse in the far southeastern corner of Stillwater County, Kansas, and walked to the head of a shallow draw the family called Blackroot. There stood a curb of dressed stone, polished smooth, ringing a shaft that dropped thirty-one feet into the earth. Rogers descended into that shaft every ninth day to do what his family had quietly done for seven years. That evening he did not come back up.
His wife, Junia, waited at the kitchen window until dusk, then went to the head of the draw with a lantern. The windlass rope was still let out, the chair at the bottom, no light showing at the top of the curb. She called down. There was no answer.
She did not descend. She walked back to the cabin and told her children that their father had not come up. At first light the next morning, she sent her youngest child, fifteen-year-old Petra, south on the wagon road toward the town of Bracken to fetch the marshal. Petra reached Marshal Cole Hendricks a little after two in the afternoon.
She told him her father had not come up from the well. He wrote the word well in his book. She did not use any other word for what was at the head of the draw then or later. The Crowleys were not originally a Kansas family.
Rogers was born in Boone County, Missouri in 1831, in the hill country folding into the northern Ozarks. His grandfather Lemuel had come into that country from western Virginia in the 1790s and taken up a stony claim in 1801. In the summer of 1809, an old man walking west had stopped at Lemuel’s cabin and stayed three months. He brought no trade goods, only conversation, and in those months he taught Lemuel a practice.
He said that other places existed, scattered across the continent, placed by an older people no living man had ever seen. They were structures for reading the state of the ground. He taught Lemuel what a properly maintained place looked like and what a divergence in the reading meant. He said his own line was ending with him.
Lemuel Crowley was the first man he had met who had listened without asking whether he was well in the head. Then the old man walked west in September 1809 and never came back through. The knowledge passed from father to son, never used. Rogers first stood beside the curb in the spring of 1868, only days after taking up his homestead claim, and understood without being told that whatever the curb was, it was older than any hand that had drawn a map of Kansas.
He built his cabin half a mile down the draw at the mouth, kept the head unfenced, and told his family it was too rough for good grazing. For four years he walked up there alone. In the summer of 1872 he descended for the first time. The shaft cut through topsoil, hard clay, and pale rose-tan limestone for the final sixteen feet.
That limestone was not native to Kansas. The walls of a small octagonal room at the bottom were the same stone, fitted so tightly that a horsehair could not enter a joint. The east wall carried a continuous band of carved marks, dense and consistent, in no writing system Rogers had ever seen. He counted 340 distinct marks, at which point the sequence began again.
On the blank west wall, at the exact height of his eyes, hung a single flat sheet of pale ivory-colored material from a stone hook dressed integral with the wall. On its face were 52 shallow incised marks. In the center of the floor, a small depression was warm to the palm, warm the way a coffee cup half an hour empty is warm, though the room had no heat source and no vent. Rogers understood the room.
The east wall was the reading wall, describing the state of the ground below in a notation system the old man had described. The sheet on the west wall was the picture of the ground in its ordinary state. When the band diverged from the sheet, the ground below had shifted. The reader knelt at the depression and read the divergences aloud, and by receiving the account, the ground corrected.
He wrote all of this in a leather journal. That night he told Junia the whole of it, the story of his grandfather and the old man and the descent. She listened for over two hours. Then she said they were both too far into it now not to see what came of it, and that she would help him keep it a family matter until the children were old enough to be told.
The practice ran on a ninth-day cycle without deviation from July 1872. Rogers held 287 sessions in just over seven years, never missing once. Junia kept the ordinary life running above ground and descended only once, out of curiosity, and never spoke of what she felt during those six minutes. The child taught the reading was the eldest daughter, Wilda.
She was sixteen in the autumn of 1876 when Rogers began training her. She stood at the east wall for twenty minutes on her first descent, then said she could see the shape of it, that the marks had a rhythm describing something under the floor. Rogers wrote that his daughter had a natural readiness he himself had not possessed, and that he was not entirely comfortable with what that meant. She read alongside him for three years.
During the account portion of sessions, both of them came to feel a presence standing on the far side of the depression, listening. Rogers called it, in the journal, the man who receives, and believed it had been there since the room was built, receiving the accounts of every reader who had ever descended. On the twenty-fourth of September 1879, Rogers and Wilda descended for the ninth-day session and recorded three divergences, including a two-lift of a shape Rogers had not seen before. He wrote that evening that the shape had a quality he did not yet have language for, and that he wanted to watch it closely.
The next session fell on the third of October. He told Wilda at breakfast he was going down alone, so that he could read the wall without another reader in the room and be the first to see what the divergence had become. He descended in the late afternoon. He did not come back up.
Marshal Hendricks descended the following morning. He found Rogers Crowley dead at the bottom of the shaft, not fallen, no wound, fully clothed except for his boots. He was kneeling at the west wall directly below the hook, forehead pressed against the stone, arms straight down at his sides, hands open, palms turned outward and backward, a rotation a living man could achieve only with deliberate effort. His mouth was open in the shape of a word begun but not finished.
Dr. Ivor Core of Fisk Corner examined the body and wrote the official cause as cardiac failure due to exposure. In his private notes he wrote the phrase position not accounted for. He did not elaborate.
The night before the burial, Junia took down her husband’s journal and read his last entry. Rogers had written that what he had seen on the twenty-fourth was not a two-lift. He had miscounted because what he was looking at was so much larger than anything he had ever seen that his mind refused to name it. It was an eight.
He had written, I am descending this afternoon to read it a second time and be sure. If it is what I think it is, I will note it in the account and think about what to do. The ninth day after Rogers’s descent fell on the twelfth of October. Wilda rose before the rest of the family, left a note saying someone in the family must read the wall, and walked to the head of the draw alone.
She descended without a lantern, in the dark. Ansel found her kneeling at the west wall in the same position, dead for over two hours, palms turned outward and backward, mouth open in the shape of a word begun but not finished. Dr. Core noted the position was identical to her father’s in every particular he had recorded.
The ninth day after Wilda’s descent fell on the twenty-first. Ansel had not been trained to read. He said his lack of training was his advantage, that he could see the room from the outside, and that the sheet was the mechanism. If the mechanism was destroyed, the machine stopped.
Junia said no. Ansel did not argue. He waited. In the night he went to the head of the draw, rigged the harness, and descended alone with a claw hammer.
Hendricks found him kneeling at the west wall below the hook, dead, holding the sheet in his right hand. The sinew cord had been broken, but the sheet was undamaged. Hendricks carried the sheet up into the daylight, found it still warm to his hand, and descended again to put it back on the hook. He wrote that he had known standing at the west wall that the sheet had to go back.
He wrote that he could not say why. He wrote it anyway. On the evening of the twenty-third, Junia sat with Petra and told her what was going to happen. She said the room was not killing the readers.
The room had been reading the ground through the readers for a very long time. The eight was what the ground below was doing, and the room had reported it accurately. What was wrong was that the eight required a completion the family could not give. The Crowleys had not been the family the room had been built to be read by.
She said the ninth day after Ansel’s descent would fall on the thirtieth, and she intended to descend the shaft that morning and did not intend to come back up. She was going, she said, to give her presence to the account as an acknowledgement that the family had received the eight and had chosen to give what they had rather than leave the ground unanswered. She said Petra was to walk out at first light on the thirty-first, speak to Marshal Hendricks, Dr. Core, Reverend Shack, and Judge Weem in that order, and leave Stillwater County forever.
She left a letter on top of the leather journal. It read: The account cannot be finished by a family in one direction. It should have been finished by the family that placed the sheet. That family did not finish it.
We cannot finish it either. I go so that Petra will not have to. On the morning of the thirtieth, Junia rose before Petra, drank a cup of coffee, and walked up the draw without looking back. Petra sat at the kitchen window all day.
Her mother did not come up. She had not expected her to. Petra walked out at first light on the thirty-first of October and reached the marshal’s office a little after ten. She gave Hendricks the journal and her mother’s letter and began to speak.
The inquest before Judge Oliver Weem ran from the thirty-first of October through the fifth of November. On the sixth, the judge issued a final order of two pages. The last paragraph read that the well at the head of the draw was not a matter the court was competent to adjudicate, that it would not be opened or investigated further, that no fence would be built, no marker set, the sheet on the hook left undisturbed, and anyone descending the shaft would do so without the protection of the county. When Stillwater County was dissolved in 1897, the records went to Topeka, and the land eventually passed to the Kansas Department of Wildlife under a fictional easement of 1953.
The curb still stands. The shaft is still open. The sheet, so far as anyone has looked, is still on the hook. No one has descended since Hendricks in December of 1879.
Petra went to Wichita, taught school for forty-one years, never married. In 1911 she used her savings to have proper markers cut for the four graves in the Bracken Cemetery. She died in 1957 at the age of ninety-three. Her manuscript ended with a paragraph she wrote six weeks after her eighty-fifth birthday.
I was 15 years old the morning I walked out of the draw and I have been 85 for 6 weeks now. And in the 70 years between I have understood one thing, which is that we were never the readers of the wall. We were the sound the wall made when it read itself.
The ground below Blackroot Draw has diverged for 146 years without an account, and whether it has settled on its own is a question no one intends to answer.