On the morning of October 3, 1879, Junia Crowley walked out of her farmhouse in the far southeastern corner of Stillwater County, Kansas, crossed a half acre of browning bluestem grass, and stopped at the edge of a shallow draw the family called Blackroot. At its head stood a curb of dressed stone, about six feet across and eighteen inches high, mortared with no mortar the county had a name for, polished to a smoothness the plains weather could not mark. That curb ringed a shaft. The shaft went down thirty-one feet to a room.
Her husband, Rogers, had gone down into that room the evening before, as he did every ninth day, and he had not come up. Junia looked into the shaft for a long time. Then she walked back to the house and sent her fifteen-year-old daughter, Petra, south on the wagon road toward the town of Bracken to find the marshal. She did not send her son, Ansel, who was twenty, or her older daughter, Wilder, who was twenty-two and trained to descend alongside her father.
She sent the youngest child, and she sent her alone. Petra reached Bracken a little after two in the afternoon and told Marshal Cole Hendricks that her father had not come up from the well. That word, well, was the only word she used for what stood in the head of the draw, then or later. By the time Hendricks and his deputy rode out to the Crowley farm, it was near dusk.
They measured the shaft with hemp rope and lantern, and the marshal himself descended first. What he found at the bottom, and what he wrote in a seventy-three-page report sealed for a hundred and forty-six years, was the first of four deaths in the same room, in the same manner, over twenty-seven days. Only one Crowley walked out of that draw alive, and she walked out at dawn on the last day of October and did not stop until she reached the county seat. The Crowleys were not originally a Kansas family.
Rogers Crowley was born in Boone County, Missouri, in 1831, in the hill country folding into the northern edge of the Ozarks. His grandfather Lemuel had come into that country from western Virginia in the last years of the 1790s, and in the summer of 1809 an old man walking west had stayed with the family for three months. That old man taught Lemuel a practice. He spoke of places scattered across the continent, structures built by an older people no living man had ever seen, built 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 the knowledge was worth carrying whether or not it was used, and that if Lemuel or his son or his son’s son ever came to such a place, they would recognize it. The old man walked west and never returned. Lemuel died without ever finding a place.
His son Azel never found one either. But in the last eleven days of Azel Crowley’s life, in the spring of 1869, he told his son Rogers the substance of what he had been taught. And Rogers, sitting at the head of his father’s bed, understood that he had already come to a place. He had stood beside the curb at Blackroot Draw in 1868, and he had known, without being told, that it was older than any white man in Kansas, any Osage man in Kansas, any hand that had drawn a map of Kansas.
Rogers spent three years walking the ground and thinking. In the summer of 1871 he built a windlass of oak timber and hemp rope over the curb. In the second week of July 1872, at first light, he descended. The shaft cut through topsoil and clay, then through sixteen feet of pale rose-tan limestone that was not native to the country.
The country rock was tan sandstone. The limestone had been placed there. At the bottom was a room, eighteen feet east to west, twelve feet north to south, with an arched ceiling. The east wall carried a continuous band of carved marks at chest height, running the full twelve feet.
Rogers counted 340 distinct marks before the sequence began again. The west wall was blank except for one feature: a stone hook, dressed integral with the wall, from which hung a single flat sheet of pale ivory-colored material about the size of a man’s palm. On its face were fifty-two incised marks, seven rows of seven marks plus a final row of three. The back was blank.
In the center of the floor was a depression eight inches across and two deep, warm to the palm the way a coffee cup half an hour empty is warm. There was no source of heat. Rogers understood the room by standing in it. The east wall band showed the state of the ground below; the sheet on the hook was the picture of the ground in its ordinary state.
When the band matched the sheet, the ground below was quiet. When the band departed from the sheet, the ground had shifted. The reader recorded the divergences in a journal, then knelt at the depression and read them aloud. He called the presence he felt listening on the far side of the depression, during the account and only during the account, “the man who receives.
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The practice ran every ninth day without deviation from July 1872 to October 1879, 287 sessions. Rogers never missed one. His daughter Wilder, whom he began training when she turned sixteen, accompanied him for the last three years. She had a natural readiness for the reading that her father admitted he had not had.
The family kept the practice secret from everyone outside the household. The autumn of 1879 was ordinary in most respects. On the ninth-day session of September 24, Rogers recorded three divergences from the sheet, including a two-lift at a position seven feet from the north corner of the east wall. He wrote that its shape was unlike any two-lift he had seen before.
He wanted to watch it closely. The ninth day fell on October 3. Rogers told Wilder that he was going down alone. He wanted to read the wall without another reader in the room, to be the first to see whether the lift had grown.
He descended in the late afternoon, later than he had ever descended in October. He did not come back up. At first light on October 4, Junia sent Petra to Bracken for the marshal. Hendricks arrived at dusk, and at first light on October 5 he descended.
He was in the room about eleven minutes. He came up without speaking and stood in the stubble of the pasture for half an hour, looking east. Dr. Ivor Core, the county physician, examined the body.
Rogers Crowley was found kneeling at the west wall directly below the hook, forehead pressed against the stone, arms straight at his sides, hands open with palms rotated outward and backward. The doctor noted that a living man could achieve that rotation only with deliberate effort, and that no corpse would adopt it from any ordinary process. The mouth was open in the shape of a word begun but not finished. The official cause of death was cardiac failure.
The private note, written atop the third page, read: “Position not accounted for. ”
Rogers was buried on October 7. At the graveside, none of the four remaining Crowleys cried. Reverend Shack wrote privately that all four looked at the ground the way a man looks at a door he knows is going to open again.
The ninth day after Rogers’s descent fell on October 12, a Sunday. Before dawn, Wilder rose, left a note saying someone in the family must read the wall, and walked to the head of the draw. She did not take a lantern. Ansel found her at the bottom, kneeling at the west wall in the same position as her father, cold through, no wound, mouth shaped like a word begun but not finished.
She had died within an hour of arriving at the room. The ninth day after that fell on October 21. Ansel rose in the night, took no lantern, and carried a claw hammer. He intended to remove the sheet from the hook and destroy it.
Hendricks found him kneeling at the west wall, the sheet in his right hand, the sinew cord broken. The sheet was undamaged. Dr. Core noted that the force required to remove the sheet from Ansel’s hand exceeded what the man could have exerted in ordinary life.
The marshal carried the sheet up the shaft, held it in daylight, and found it still warm. He descended again with it, tied a new hemp string through its hole, and hung it back on the hook exactly where Ansel had taken it. He wrote that he had known standing at the west wall that the sheet had to go back. On the evening of October 23, Junia Crowley sat with Petra and told her what would happen.
She said the room was not killing the readers; the ground below had diverged in a way that required a completion the family could not give. She said she would descend on the thirtieth and would not come back up, so that Petra would not have to. She left a letter on the leather journal: “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 October 30, Junia rose, drank coffee, walked up the draw to the head, rigged the harness, and descended.
She did not look back. Petra waited through the day, sat with the journal on her lap, watched the head of the draw, and did not see her mother come up. At first light on October 31, Petra walked out of the cabin. She did not look back, and she did not walk up to the head of the draw.
She walked south to Bracken, reached the marshal’s office a little after ten in the morning, gave the journal and her mother’s letter to Hendricks, and began to speak. The inquest ran from October 31 through November 5. On November 6, Judge Oliver Weem issued a final order: the shaft would not be opened or investigated further, no fence would be built, no marker set, the sheet on the hook was to remain undisturbed, and anyone descending would do so without the protection of the county. The state of Kansas erased the family from its ordinary histories.
Stillwater County was dissolved in 1897, absorbed into neighboring counties. Bracken shrank to an intersection, two county roads, and a small cemetery. The oldest stones there bear four names and years only: Rogers, Junia, Wilder, and Ansel Crowley. Petra paid for the markers in 1911 from teaching wages in Wichita.
No one has descended the shaft since December 1879. The curb still stands on leased grassland administered by a state agency that does not know what is under it. The sheet still hangs on the hook in the room, if anyone were willing to descend and look. Petra Crowley lived to 1957.
In the last decade of her life she wrote down the story of what her family had been doing under the earth of southeastern Kansas. 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. We were never the readers of the wall. We were the sound the wall made when it read itself.
” After that, she wrote, the ground below Blackroot Draw had diverged for a hundred and forty-six years without an account, and whether it had settled on its own or whether the man who receives takes nothing in now is a question no one intends to answer.