In the far southeastern corner of what was then Stillwater County, Kansas, a shallow draw known only to a few local families as Blackroot held a secret that would consume the Crowley family across seven years and claim four lives in twenty-seven days. The story begins on the morning of October 3, 1879, when Junia Crowley walked from her farmhouse to the head of the draw and looked down a shaft her husband had descended the evening before and had not returned from.
She 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 had been trained to descend the shaft alongside her father. She sent the youngest child, and she sent her alone.
Petra reached Bracken a little after two in the afternoon. She told Marshal Cole Hendricks that her father had not come up from the well. She used that word, well, and the marshal wrote it in his book. She did not use any other word for what was 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 rated the shaft themselves with a length of hemp rope and a lantern the family provided. The marshal went down first because the deputy would not go until Hendricks had gone.
What Hendricks found at the bottom of that shaft, and what he wrote about in a seventy-three-page report that has been sealed in one form or another for 146 years, was the first of four deaths in the same room in the same manner over the space of 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 walking until she reached the county seat. She never went back. She lived to 1957.
In the last decade of her life, Petra Crowley wrote down what her family had been doing under the earth of southeastern Kansas since her birth year, and what her father had come to believe was standing on the far side of the room while he read.
The Crowleys were not originally a Kansas family. Rogers Crowley was born in Boone County, Missouri, in the hill country that folds into the northern edge of the Ozarks, in the year 1831. His father, Azor Crowley, farmed a stony piece of ground along a fork of a fork of a creek that had never been named on any commercial map.
His grandfather, Lemuel Crowley, had come into that country from further east, from a place in western Virginia that no surviving document names precisely, in the last year of the 1790s. Lemuel took up the Boone County claim in 1801. He died in 1841 at eighty-three, buried on the ridge above the fork of the fork. His wife was buried beside him in 1869. Both graves are still there, though the cabin has fallen in, and the family that owns the land now runs cattle over both stones without knowing whose they are.
Rogers Crowley left Missouri in the spring of 1867. He was thirty-six. He had a wife, Junia, who had been Junia Hollis of Taney County, and three children: Wilder, Ansel, and Petra, still a baby that spring. He was not a Confederate veteran, and he was not a Union veteran. The war had passed through the Missouri hill country in a form that did not require a uniform.
When the war ended, the road did not go back to the way it had been. Rogers had a growing family and a small farm, and so he did what a great many hill country Missouri men did after the war. He went west. He did not go far. He crossed into extreme southeastern Kansas, into a county organized only six years earlier along the eastern edge of the old Osage diminished reserve, on ground that had been open to settlement in 1865.
The county was called Stillwater. Its seat was a town called Bracken, which had a courthouse of green sawn oak, a livery, a general store, a Methodist meeting house, and just under four hundred people. The county did not last. It was dissolved in 1897, absorbed piece by piece into the neighboring counties, and Bracken shrank across four decades until only an intersection of two county roads and a small cemetery marked where it had been.
That cemetery is still there. The oldest stones in it are Rogers Crowley, Junia Crowley, Wilder Crowley, and Ansel Crowley. All four bear only names and years. No mode of death, no epitaph, no scripture. The stones were paid for and set by Petra Crowley in 1911, thirty-two years after her family died, when she had saved enough from teaching wages in Wichita to have proper markers cut.
The land Rogers took up in 1868 was 320 acres in the head of a shallow draw about nine miles northwest of Bracken. The draw was called Blackroot by the few Osage families who had summered there in earlier decades, in reference to a stand of black-rooted grass where the spring water rose and stained the earth around its lip.
Rogers filed for the section under the terms of the 1862 Homestead Act and paid the filing fee at Bracken. His name entered the county land record. The name Blackroot Draw did not. It was known to Rogers and Junia and later to their children, to the surveyor who ran the section corners in 1869, and to Marshal Hendricks ten years later when Petra rode in. Otherwise, the draw had no formal name and no reason to be described in any county document.
The curb was there when Rogers walked the section for the first time in the late spring of 1868. He wrote about that first walk in the leather journal he began keeping four years later, in 1872. The entry describing his first walk of the ground was written from memory. It is the earliest entry in the journal, and it is dated April 1868, though he did not write it in that month.
He wrote it in the summer of 1872, four years after seeing the curb for the first time, and by then he understood what he had seen. What he wrote was this: there is at the head of the draw a curb of stone. It is round and it is the height of my knee and it is thick as my hand is long. The top of it is worn or made smooth, I cannot say which.
Below the top of it is a shaft that drops so straight into the ground that I could not on that first day account for the fact of it being there. I did not look over the top of it that day. I stood beside it for maybe half an hour and I understood without being told that whatever the curb was, it was older than any white man in Kansas or any Osage man in Kansas or any hand that had drawn a map of Kansas, and I understood that I was not the first person to stand beside it who knew that.
He did not tell Junia about the curb that first day. He did not tell her about it for four years. He also did not build the family cabin at the head of the draw. He built it half a mile down the draw near the mouth, where the ground was flat enough for a garden and where a wagon could get in and out.
He fenced pasture across the middle of the section and he kept the head of the draw as an unfenced piece of grazing that he told the children to leave alone. He said it was too rough for good grazing and that a milk cow could go lame going up in there. Junia and the children accepted this.
They lived at the mouth of the draw and they farmed the flat and they ran a small herd of Durham cattle, and Rogers made a modest but sufficient living, and none of them went to the head of the draw for the first four years. Rogers went. He went alone. He went at intervals that Junia later realized had been more regular than they seemed, and he came back from those walks in a way she later described in the manner of a man who had gone up the ridge to think and had come back with a decision he was not yet ready to speak about.
In the summer of 1872, Rogers Crowley descended the shaft for the first time. He was forty-one. He wrote about the descent in the first proper entry of the journal, dated the fourteenth of July, 1872. He had spent the four years walking the ground and thinking, and he had spent the previous three years since his father Azor had died in Boone County in 1869 understanding what his father had told him at the end.
Azor Crowley had died in the last week of April 1869 at the age of seventy-five, of what a country doctor at the time called a lingering weakness of the chest. Rogers had gone back to Missouri that spring on receipt of word that his father was failing. He had left Junia and the three children on the Kansas place, and he had ridden east, and he had spent the last eleven days of his father's life sitting at the head of the bed in the cabin where Rogers himself had been born.
Across those eleven days, on the evenings when Azor had the breath for it, Azor had told his son a family history that Rogers had never heard in all his thirty-eight years of being that man's son. Rogers wrote the substance of what his father told him into the front pages of the journal in 1872, and it is the second entry after the recalled description of the curb.
His grandfather, Lemuel, had come into Boone County in 1801 at the age of forty-three. Lemuel had been born in 1758, and he had lived his early life in western Virginia, and he had come across the Cumberland Gap in the 1780s, and he had drifted through eastern Kentucky and southern Illinois in the 1790s before crossing the Mississippi and coming into the Missouri hill country when the region was still Spanish Louisiana.
He had taken up his stony piece of Boone County ground, and he had married a woman named Prudence Marth who had come out of Tennessee. And in the summer of 1809, when Lemuel was fifty-one and had a young son Azor who was still a child, a man had come through the Missouri hill country walking west.
Azor had described this man to Rogers as best he had remembered him from being a small child. The man had been old already in 1809. He had been perhaps in his sixties. He had spoken English with an accent that Lemuel could not place, and that Azor as a boy had not been old enough to know he should have tried to place. He had carried a leather satchel, and he had asked Lemuel for shelter and food, and had offered nothing but conversation in return.
Lemuel had given him the shelter and the food. The old man had stayed with the Crowleys through the summer and into the early fall of 1809, three months in all. And in those three months he had taught Lemuel Crowley a practice.
Azor had described the practice to Rogers only in fragments. The old man had known of a place, and the place was not in Missouri, and the old man was going there to look at it one last time before he did not have the strength to walk that far again. He had told Lemuel that the place had once been maintained by a family, and that the family had failed in its maintenance three generations back and had walked away. And that the place had not been maintained since, and that he was going to see what condition it was in without any intention of maintaining it himself.
He had told Lemuel that other places existed, that they were scattered across the continent, that they had been placed by an older people whom no living man had ever seen, and that they were structures for reading the state of the ground. He had taught Lemuel the reading. He had taught him what the appearance of a properly maintained place was and what a divergence in the reading meant.
He had taught him that the reading required a room built for that reading, and that the room was already there wherever a place had been placed, and that a person born to it and instructed in it would recognize the room when they came to it and would recognize the wall when they read it and would recognize the sheet on the hook when they saw it, and would know without having to be told that they had come to a place that had been waiting for them.
Lemuel had asked the old man why he was telling him these things when he was not himself intending to maintain any place. The old man had said that the practice had to be kept somewhere, that his own line was ending with him because he had no children, that he was too old to teach anyone new to it in the ordinary way, and that Lemuel Crowley was the first man he had met on his walk west who had listened to what he was saying without asking him to explain himself further and without asking him whether he was well in the head.
The old man had said that Lemuel did not have to do anything with what he was being taught. He had said that 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 a place that had been placed, they would recognize it and they could then decide what to do.
The old man had walked west in the second week of September 1809. He had not come back through. Lemuel had not seen him again. Lemuel had lived another thirty-two years, and he had never come to a place that had been placed, and in the last two years of his own life he had told his son Azor the substance of what the old man had taught him.
Azor had lived his whole life in the Boone County cabin, and he had never come to a place either, and in the last eleven days of his own life he had told his son Rogers the substance of the substance, as much as he could remember, as much as he could still get out with what breath he had left.
Rogers had listened to his father in the cabin in Boone County in April 1869, and he had understood sitting there at the head of the old man's bed that he had already come to a place. He had walked the ground of it in the spring of 1868 and he had stood beside the curb for half an hour without knowing what he was looking at.
By the time his father had gotten through the first two evenings of telling him what he had been told, Rogers had known that the curb at the head of Blackroot Draw was one of the places the old man from further west had described in 1809. And when his father died at the end of the eleven days, Rogers had ridden back to Kansas carrying a piece of knowledge that had been in his family for three generations, transmitted father to son and never used, and now finally arrived at the man to whom the knowledge could be applied.
He had not descended the shaft that summer. He had spent the summer of 1869 going up to the head of the draw and standing beside the curb and thinking. He had spent the summer of 1870 going up and looking over the top of the curb into the shaft. He had spent the summer of 1871 building a small windlass over the curb of oak timber and hemp rope, capable of lowering a man on a bosun's chair of rope and plank.
In the second week of July 1872, he had gone alone to the head of the draw at first light with a lantern of pressed tin and a supply of matches wrapped in oiled cloth. He had rigged the bosun's chair and he had descended.
The shaft was thirty-one feet from the top of the curb to the floor. Rogers measured it with a plumb line before he descended. It was cut through the topsoil for the first four feet, through hard clay for the next eleven, and through pale rose-tan limestone for the remaining sixteen.
Limestone was not the country rock of Blackroot Draw. The country rock was the same tan sandstone that made up the whole eastern edge of Kansas and the western edge of Missouri. There was no exposed limestone within thirty miles of the draw in any direction. What Rogers descended through for the last sixteen feet of the shaft was stone that had been placed there. Not native to Kansas, not native to Missouri.
He wrote in the journal that the stone of the shaft walls felt shaped by a mason so long dead that the distinction between what is shaped and what has grown had lost its meaning. He wrote that the joints of the shaft were too tight to admit a horsehair. He wrote that he tried a horsehair.
At the bottom of the shaft, he stepped off the bosun's chair onto the floor of a room. He raised the lantern. The room was eighteen feet from east to west and twelve feet from north to south. The ceiling was eight feet at the peak of a gentle arch. Walls, ceiling, and floor were the same pale rose-tan limestone as the last sixteen feet of the shaft. And the joints of the room stones were, if anything, tighter than the joints of the shaft.
The stone was cool to the palm at the walls, room temperature at the ceiling, and warm at the floor. Rogers wrote that the warmth was concentrated in a small depression at the center of the floor, eight inches across and two inches deep, dressed to the same standard as the rest of the room. He knelt at the depression, put his palm to it, and wrote that the stone at the bottom was warm the way a coffee cup half an hour empty is warm.
There was no source of heat that he could identify. The room was, by every visible feature, a sealed room of shaped stone with no fireplace, no vent, no crack in any joint, no water seep, no air movement.
He raised the lantern and looked at the east wall. The east wall carried a continuous band of carved marks at the height of his chest, running the full twelve feet of the wall from north corner to south corner. The band was three inches high. The marks were dense, organized, consistent in the hand that had made them, and did not resemble any writing system Rogers had ever seen or would ever see.
Rogers Crowley had been a fair reader in his time. He had read the Bible in the King James, and he had read enough Latin as a schoolboy to know that the marks were not Latin. He had seen a Cherokee syllabary once at a schoolmaster's meeting in Bracken in 1870, and the marks on the wall were not Cherokee. He had seen Osage lodge inscriptions on trees along the Neosho River in his first winter in Kansas. The marks on the east wall were not those either.
They were nothing that could be attached to any name Rogers had a name for. He wrote that they were older than any script he had ever heard mentioned in a book. He wrote that he could not have said how he knew this.
He walked slowly along the east wall with the lantern held up and he counted for something over an hour in the room, with the lantern hissing gently in the still air. He counted and arrived at 340 distinct marks, at which point the sequence began again. 340 was not a number he had expected. 340 was a number that a man used to reading a Bible would find peculiar because it was not a biblical number. It was not any number he had a use for. He noted it in the journal and moved on.
He turned to the west wall. The west wall was blank, pale rose-tan limestone dressed to the same precision as the east wall. No marks, no seam, no feature at any point along its twelve-foot length from the north corner to the south corner. Except for one thing.
At the exact height of Rogers's own eyes, at the exact middle of the wall, there was a hook. The hook was a stone hook. It was dressed integral with the wall so that it was of the same block or blocks and there was no join between the hook and the wall behind it. It projected outward from the wall about the length of a man's thumb. It was shaped in the form of a small hook, the size of a man's fist, curled slightly downward at the tip. It had been polished to the same finish as the depression in the floor.
Rogers put his palm on it. It was slightly warmer than the wall around it but not as warm as the floor. From the hook, on a fine cord of what appeared to be braided sinew, hung a single flat sheet of pale ivory-colored material about the size of a man's palm. The sheet was drilled at the top and hung by the cord. The cord was old but not brittle. The sheet was old in the way the wall was old, which was to say that its age exceeded the ordinary meaning of the word.
Rogers wrote that the material of the sheet was not bone and was not stone and was not any wood he had ever handled and was not any hide he had ever worked with, and he could not name what it was. He wrote that it felt warm in his hand the way a pebble that has been in the sun feels warm, though the room had no sun and had never had one.
On the face of the sheet were fifty-two shallow incised marks, seven rows of seven marks plus a final row of three. The marks were in an alphabet unlike any Rogers had ever seen and unlike the marks on the east wall, smaller, less elaborate, but the same consistent hand as the wall band, or a hand very close to it.
Rogers took the sheet down from the hook and turned it in the lantern light and looked at both sides. The back of the sheet was blank. He put the sheet back on the hook exactly as he had found it and he stepped back.
He stood at the east wall and he looked at the west wall and he understood standing there what the room was. The east wall was the reading wall. The band of 340 marks on the east wall described, in the notation system the old man from further west had told Lemuel Crowley about in 1809, what the ground under this room was doing.
The ground under this room, meaning the deeper rock and the water table and whatever it was that lay below the place limestone of the room and the shaft, had a state. The state was ordinarily quiet and ordinarily contained. It was contained by the fact of the room being here, by the fact of the placement having been made. When the state changed, meaning when the ground below did something that departed from its ordinary contained quiet, the band on the east wall showed it.
Rogers did not in that first descent know how the band showed it. He knew only that it did, and he knew that a man trained to read the band, meaning a man taught the reading by an old man walking west, or by that old man's son, or that son's son, would be able to see the divergence in the band and could name it and could count it.
The west wall was the key. The sheet on the hook was the picture, in fifty-two marks, of the ground in its ordinary state. When the band on the east wall matched the sheet on the west wall, the ground below was quiet. When the band on the east wall departed from the sheet, the ground below had shifted. And by how much and in what direction was told by the specific departure.
The depression in the floor was the third element. Rogers understood, standing in the middle of the room in the summer of 1872, that the reader stood at the east wall and read the band, and that the reader carried a journal in which he recorded the divergences from the sheet, and that on the next session, the reader knelt at the center of the room and read the record from the journal aloud into the depression on the floor.
The room system was a three-party arrangement. The reader read the wall. The reader wrote the divergence. The reader spoke the divergence into the floor. What was under the floor received the account. And by the receiving of the account, the ground corrected. Not always and not by any mechanism the reader could observe, but over the succession of many readings, the gap between band and sheet tended to close again, and the ground below tended to settle again, and the room remained a room.
He wrote all of this in the journal sitting on the floor of the room in the lantern light in the summer of 1872. And when he had finished writing, he sat for a long time in the quiet of the room, and he thought about what he had been taught by his father in Boone County three years earlier. And about what his father had been taught by his grandfather. And about what his grandfather had been taught by an old man walking west in 1809.
He understood that the practice had come to rest with him. He was the man who had come to the place. The knowledge had arrived. It was in him to descend the shaft again in nine days and to begin the practice. Or it was in him to refuse it and to close the shaft and to walk back down the draw and to say nothing about what was under the head of Blackroot to anyone, including his wife and his children, and to let the ground below diverge as it would and to let the room become a room that no one read.
He climbed the bosun's chair back up the shaft. He walked back down the draw to the cabin. He sat with Junia through supper and he did not tell her that afternoon what he had found. He told her that night after the children were asleep. And he told her the whole of it.
The story of his grandfather and the old man from further west. The story of his father's death in Boone County. The story of his four years of walking the ground of the draw. The story of his descent that morning. The reading of the wall and the sheet on the hook. The depression in the floor.
He told her that he had come to a place and that the knowledge of what the place required was in him, and in no one else in Kansas. And that he did not know what to do.
Junia listened. She listened for something over two hours without interrupting. And when he had finished, she said that they were both too far into it now not to see what came of it. And that she would help him. And that they would keep it a family matter until the children were old enough to be told and to decide for themselves whether to be part of it.
And that was how the practice began at the head of Blackroot Draw in the summer of 1872.
The practice, as Rogers Crowley developed it across the seven years from the summer of 1872 to the autumn of 1879, ran on a ninth-day cycle. He descended the shaft on the ninth day at whatever time of day the light and the weather permitted. He carried the leather journal. He carried a lantern of pressed tin with a supply of fresh oil. He carried a small brass pen and a pot of prepared ink.
He wore a coat regardless of the season because the room was cool and the descent was slow, and he had learned by his third session that his hands worked better on the wall reading if he had not been chilled through by the descent. He wore no boots on the shaft floor. He left the boots at the top of the curb beside the windlass, and he climbed the bosun's chair in his stocking feet.
This last was not from any instruction he had been given by his father. It was something he had come to on his own in the first month of readings, when he had noticed that the floor of the room and the depression on it were both warmer under his palm when he was in stocking feet and had been standing on the floor for a while than when he had first descended in boots. He had come to believe, without being sure, that the room preferred a reader who was in direct contact with its floor. He had not been able to test this. He had simply continued to do it, and after the first month he had done it every time.
The reading took him in his first year upward of three hours. It came down to about ninety minutes by the second year and an hour by the third. He would begin at the north end of the east wall. He would walk slowly along the band, holding the lantern up so the marks fell in direct light. He would count and compare them mark for mark against the sheet on the hook of the west wall. Not by looking back and forth, but by memory.
He had memorized the sheet in his first month, and by the end of the first year, he could hold all 340 marks of the east wall in his memory and turn the comparison in his head. He looked for a divergence. He looked for a place where the band said something the sheet did not. He looked for what he came to call in his journal a lift, meaning a place where the ground below was pressing upward more than it ordinarily did, or a slack, meaning a place where the ground below was quieter than it ordinarily was.
He recorded lifts and slacks in the journal by their position along the east wall from the north corner in feet and inches, and by their approximate magnitude, which he scored on a rough five-part scale of his own devising. A one-lift was barely detectable. A five-lift was a departure of the sort he had read about once in his first year, and which had prompted him to keep to the ninth-day cycle rigorously through the winter of 1872-3, because a five-lift meant the ground was doing something that required attention.
Once he had recorded the divergences, he walked to the center of the room and knelt at the depression. He set the journal open on his knee. He read aloud in ordinary English the divergences he had recorded, one after another, position and score. He named each one plainly, did not embellish or explain. When he had read them all, he closed the journal and remained kneeling for a period he came to know by feel, which was between two and three minutes, until he felt the room settle back. Then he stood, walked back to the bosun's chair, and ascended.
That was the practice. It ran every ninth day without deviation from July the fourteenth of 1872 until October the third of 1879. That is a span of seven years and just under three months. 287 sessions by Junia's counting from her cross-referenced ledger.
Rogers never missed a session. He did not miss when a bad chest cold in the winter of 1874 left him light-headed on the descent. He did not miss when Junia's mother died in Missouri in 1876, and he delayed his travel until after the ninth day's session was done. He did not miss during the drought of 1877, hauling water twice a day from the spring on almost no sleep. He never missed. He held the cycle for seven years and just under three months.
Junia knew about the practice from that first night in 1872. She supported it, but she did not descend the shaft herself. Rogers offered to teach her the reading once in the winter of 1873, and she said that she would rather not, that the knowledge was in him, and that she would keep his ordinary life going up top while he did the ninth day work below.
She did descend the shaft one time in the summer of 1875, out of what she later told Petra was ordinary curiosity. She stood in the room for a period of maybe six minutes and looked at the wall and the sheet and the depression, and then climbed back up. She never went down again.
She did not describe what she had felt during those six minutes to anyone then or later, including Petra, who wrote in the manuscript of 1949 that her mother had come back up from that single descent looking a certain way, and that the look on her mother's face had been the reason Petra had never asked to go down herself, though her father had offered to teach her when she was old enough.
The child who was taught the reading was the eldest daughter. Wilder Crowley had been eleven when her father first descended. She had been fourteen when he had first told her, in the spring of 1874, what he was doing at the head of the draw on the ninth day.
She had listened as her mother had listened two years earlier, and she had said when Rogers had finished that she wanted to learn it, and that she thought she had already known there was something at the head of the draw because she had felt something in that direction her whole life at the edge of thinking, and she had never told her parents because she had not wanted them to worry about her being fanciful.
She had said this at fourteen. Rogers had put down his coffee cup and had looked at her for a long moment and had said that he would begin teaching her when she was sixteen if she still wanted to be taught then. And she had said that she would still want to be taught.
She was sixteen in the autumn of 1876, and Rogers had begun teaching her. He had taken her down to the room for her first descent on the eighteenth of October, 1876, and she had stood at the east wall for maybe twenty minutes, and she had turned to him and had said that she could see the shape of it.
He had asked her what she meant, and she had said that the marks on the east wall had a rhythm, and that the rhythm was a description of something that was happening under the floor, and that she could feel the shape of the rhythm without being able to name any of the marks yet, and that she wanted her father to teach her the names.
Rogers wrote in the journal that evening that his daughter Wilder had a natural readiness for the reading that he himself had not had. He wrote that he had come to the reading through study and repetition and years of standing beside the curb before descending, and that Wilder had come to the reading in the space of twenty minutes at the age of sixteen because she had been walking around the ground above the room since she was three years old, and something in her had been listening for it the whole time.
He wrote that he did not know whether that was because she was his daughter and the family had grown into the practice, or whether it was because the room itself had a way of preparing the people who lived above it. He wrote that he thought it might be a little of both, and that he was not entirely comfortable with what that meant, but that he was not going to refuse the fact of his daughter's readiness because he was uncomfortable with the source of it.
Wilder descended alongside her father for the ninth-day sessions from October 1876 through September 1879. Three years of joint reading. She kept her own notes bound in the back of Rogers's journal, and her notes covered forty pages. She never descended alone during those three years, though she asked once in the summer of 1879, and Rogers had said not yet.
He had said that she was not to descend alone until he was satisfied that she could handle a five-lift, and that they had not had one yet during her training, and that he wanted her to have seen one before she went down without him. They never had one during her training. They had ones and twos, and they had, in the autumn of 1878, a three-lift that had prompted Rogers to write in the journal that the three had been the largest he had seen since the winter of 1872-3, and that he was watching the band closely for any escalation. The three had subsided in the following two sessions.
There was one further element of the practice that Rogers wrote about in the journal, and that Wilder came to know about, and that neither of them told Junia or the younger children about, and that came to matter greatly at the end.
Rogers first noted it in the autumn of 1876, in the same month that he had begun training Wilder. He wrote on the twenty-ninth of October, 1876, at the end of a routine ninth-day session, that during the account portion of that session, when he was kneeling at the depression and reading the divergences aloud, he had felt for the first time a specific quality of attention on the far side of the depression.
He wrote that he had not seen anything. That the lantern light had shown him nothing, that the room had not become darker or brighter or louder or quieter. But he had felt, standing on the depression side facing east, that on the west side of the depression something had been standing and that the something had been listening to him read.
He wrote that the something had a masculine quality. He wrote that he did not know why he was using that word and that he had thought about it for a full nine days between sessions before writing it down. And that the word had continued to feel accurate. Masculine in the way that a very large and very old man is masculine, without any threat and without any ordinary human presence, but present as a person is present rather than as a thing is present.
He wrote that the presence had been unspeaking. That it had not moved, but when he had risen from the depression and turned toward the west wall, the presence had not been there in any visible way. And that when he had picked up his lantern and walked to the bosun's chair, the presence had not followed him and had not attended his ascent. It had been present during the account and only during the account and only on the far side of the depression and only when Rogers was reading.
He called this presence in the journal the man who receives. He did not know what the man who receives was. He wrote across the following year in occasional notes at the end of session entries that he had come to believe the man who receives was not the ground below the floor. The ground below the floor was what he was addressing when he read the account. The man who receives was, he wrote, somewhere between the ground below and the reader above.
He wrote that he thought the man who receives had been there since the room was built, and that the room's placement had included the man who receives as one of its features, and that the man who receives had received the accounts of every reader who had ever descended the shaft and read the wall and knelt at the depression and read the record aloud, for however long the room had been in operation. He wrote that he did not know how long that was. He wrote that he did not want to know.
Wilder first felt the man who receives during her sixth descent in the spring of 1877, when she was seventeen. She turned to her father afterward and asked him whether he had felt someone standing on the far side of the depression during the account. He said that he had felt that someone for the past six months. He asked her what she had felt.
She said, according to her own notes in the back of the journal, that she had felt a person she had not been introduced to who was in the room with her family and who was being polite about it and who was going to remain polite as long as her family was polite as well. Rogers wrote that his daughter had put it better than he had managed to put it in six months of trying.
The autumn of 1879 was in most respects an ordinary autumn on the eastern edge of the Kansas prairie. The corn was in by the last week of September. The sorghum had been cut and shocked. Junia had put up thirty-seven quarts of tomatoes and twelve of blackberry preserve.
Ansel, twenty years old that summer, had spent September driving a wagon back and forth between the farm and Bracken with loads for a rancher two sections east who was building a new barn. Petra, fifteen, had started her fourth year at the county school in the settlement of Fisk Corner, six miles south of the Crowley section, and was walking the six miles both ways when the weather allowed. Wilder, twenty-two, was helping her mother in the house and taking a share of the outdoor work, and she was accompanying her father on the ninth-day sessions at the head of the draw.
It was, by every ordinary measure, a settled and prosperous late season on a small Kansas farm.
Rogers Crowley descended for the ninth-day session on the twenty-fourth of September, 1879. It was a Wednesday. Wilder descended with him as she had for every session in the previous three years. They spent about seventy minutes in the room. Rogers read the east wall band. He recorded three divergences from the sheet on the west wall. Two were one-lifts at ordinary positions along the band, and the third was a two-lift at a position about seven feet from the north corner.
Rogers knelt at the depression and read the three divergences aloud. Wilder stood a pace behind him and to his left. When Rogers had finished the account, they waited the customary two to three minutes, and Rogers rose, and they ascended.
He wrote up the session that evening at the kitchen table. He wrote that the two-lift at seven feet north was of a shape he had not seen before, and that he wanted to watch it closely on the next session. He wrote that the shape had a quality he did not have language for yet, and that it was not the ordinary shape of a two-lift. He wrote that if it grew, he wanted to be ready to see it grow, and that he would take Wilder down with him for the next session as usual, and that he would ask her whether she saw the same thing he was seeing.
The ninth day fell on the third of October, 1879. That was the Friday. Rogers did not take Wilder with him on the third of October. He told her at breakfast that morning that he was going down alone. He said that he wanted to read the wall without any other reader in the room, and that if the two-lift had grown, he wanted to be the first person to see it and to think about what it meant before he brought Wilder into the reading.
Wilder accepted this. She wrote in her own notes at the back of the journal that morning that her father had looked concerned in a way she had not seen him look before, and that when she had asked him whether he expected something in particular, he had said that he did not know what he expected and that was why he wanted to go alone.
He descended in the late afternoon at about half past four. It was the latest descent he had ever made in October. He usually preferred to descend by early afternoon so that he was back up before the light in the shaft began to fail. He told Junia at the noon meal that he had been thinking about the session all morning and that he had wanted to think about it further before descending.
Junia said in her later ledger entry, and Petra remembered this in the 1949 manuscript, that Rogers had eaten his noon meal in a way that suggested he was not tasting it. He had gone to the head of the draw after dinner and had sat beside the curb for something over an hour before rigging the bosun's chair and lowering himself. Junia had watched him from the kitchen window. She had not gone up.
He did not come back up that evening. Junia went to the head of the draw at dusk with a lantern of her own, and she found the windlass rope still let out and the chair still at the bottom of the shaft and no light showing at the top of the curb. She called down the shaft. There was no answer. She did not descend.
She walked back to the cabin and told Wilder and Ansel that their father had not come up. And she told them not to descend and not to touch the windlass and that they would wait until morning.
Wilder argued with her. Wilder said that they should go down. Junia said that they would not go down. She said this with a firmness Wilder later wrote about at the back of the journal in the last set of notes she ever made. Junia said that they were going to sleep in the cabin and that at first light they would send Petra to Bracken for the marshal, and that no member of the family was going to descend the shaft that night.
And that was what they did.
At first light on the fourth of October, Junia woke Petra and gave her breakfast and put her on the wagon road south to Bracken with instructions to find Marshal Hendricks. Petra walked the fourteen miles into town and reached the marshal's office a little after two in the afternoon.
Marshal Cole Hendricks was forty-one years old in the autumn of 1879 and had held the office for eight years. He was Bracken born, had spent the war with the Kansas 15th Cavalry, had ridden south to the Indian Territory in 1863, come back in 1865, taken the deputy's office in Bracken, and risen to the marshal's chair in 1871. He was a careful man, a slow talker, and by every account a man who did not spook.
He listened to Petra crying in his office for maybe five minutes. He asked her whether her father had a habit of staying at the head of the draw for periods of time, and whether he could have fallen asleep and forgotten to come up, or whether he could have hurt himself while he was working up there.
Petra said, in the account she gave at the inquest twenty-seven days later, that she had told the marshal that her father did not work at the head of the draw, that her father went to the head of the draw only on certain days for reasons he did not tell the children about, and that her father had never once in her entire life failed to come back to the cabin on the same day.
Hendricks wrote in the seventy-three-page report that he understood at that point that whatever was at the head of the draw was not a well in the ordinary sense of the word.
He saddled his horse and his deputy Ben O'Cyle's horse, and he took Petra with him on the wagon that Cyle drove, and they reached the Crowley cabin at about seven in the evening. Junia met them at the door and told them what she knew. Wilder was in the kitchen. Ansel was at the head of the draw, sitting beside the curb where he had been for most of the day waiting for his father to come up.
Hendricks and Cyle rode up to the head of the draw with Ansel walking alongside. Hendricks stood beside the curb and looked over the top of it and looked down. He saw the light of the lantern still burning at the bottom of the shaft, faintly. He asked Ansel whether the family had a windlass mechanism. Ansel showed him. Hendricks asked Ansel to demonstrate how his father had used it. Ansel demonstrated.
Hendricks went back down to the cabin, ate a supper of biscuits and coffee that Junia had ready for them, and told Junia that he was going to descend the shaft in the morning and that he wanted no one else to touch the windlass until then. Junia said that she had told her own family the same thing.
Hendricks and Cyle slept on the floor of the front room of the cabin. Wilder did not sleep. Ansel did not sleep. Junia, according to her later testimony, slept about two hours toward dawn.
At first light on the fifth of October, Hendricks ascended to the curb, rigged the bosun's chair on his own weight, and descended the shaft. He carried a lantern of his own. He did not carry a firearm. He wrote in the report that he had felt no need to carry one and that he had not been able to say why.
He was in the shaft for about six minutes on the descent. He was in the room for about eleven minutes. He came up in about seven minutes. He did not speak to Ansel or to Cyle at the top of the curb, and he did not go back to the cabin immediately. He walked out into the pasture below the head of the draw and he stood in the stubble of the September grass for about half an hour, looking east into the country beyond the section line.
Cyle watched him. Cyle wrote in his field notes that the marshal's face during those thirty minutes had a look on it that Cyle had never seen on Hendricks's face before, and that Cyle was familiar with the look of a man who had seen a body, and that this was different from that. It was, Cyle wrote, the look of a man who had seen a body and had also seen the room the body was in, and could not, standing in the pasture, decide which of the two things was going to be harder to write down.
Hendricks walked back to the curb after his thirty minutes. He told Cyle and Ansel that Rogers Crowley was dead at the bottom of the shaft. He said that Rogers had not fallen, that he had no wound and no sign of injury, that he was fully clothed except for his boots, which had been left at the top of the curb, and that he was in a position that Hendricks wanted a physician to see before the body was moved.
He asked Ansel to ride to Fisk Corner and to bring back Dr. Ivor Core, and to tell the doctor that the position was to be examined before the body was disturbed, and to ride hard. Ansel rode.
Dr. Core arrived at the Crowley cabin at about three on the afternoon of the fifth. He was fifty-four, Stillwater County physician for eleven years, Ohio born, trained at Cincinnati Medical College in the 1850s, careful by every account. He listened to Hendricks at the cabin door for about ten minutes, then rode up to the head of the draw. Cyle lowered him in the bosun's chair. He spent forty minutes in the room with the body. He came back up.
He wrote in the private notes that he had spent the first ten minutes of his forty minutes standing at the bottom of the shaft looking at the west wall of the room, and that he had not immediately gone to the body. He wrote that the body had been positioned in a way that had suggested to him on first entering the room that the room had something to do with the position, and that he had wanted to see the room before he saw the body. He wrote that this had been the most unusual thing he had ever done as a physician and that he had not been able at the time to explain why he was doing it.
The body of Rogers Crowley was found kneeling at the west wall of the room, directly below the observation hook, with his forehead pressed against the stone of the wall about two inches below the base of the hook. His arms were straight down at his sides. His hands were open, hanging naturally from the wrists, palms turned outward and backward so that his palms were facing behind him rather than forward or against his thighs.
Dr. Core drew this position in three views in the private notes, and the drawings survive in the Core family papers at the Kansas Historical Society. The unusual feature of the position, which Core noted repeatedly in the notes, was the rotation of the palms outward and backward.
He wrote that the rotation was a position that a living man could achieve only with deliberate effort, that it required an outward rotation of the shoulder that a corpse would not adopt from any ordinary process of falling or being placed, and that the position looked to him to be the position of a man who had chosen to hold his hands that way and had been holding them that way at the moment of death and had continued to hold them that way after death. He wrote that this was not medically possible in any framework he had been trained in. He wrote it anyway.
The body was cold through. There was no wound. The eyes were open. The mouth was open, and Core noted that the mouth was shaped in what he called in the notes the shape of a word begun but not finished. He drew the mouth from three angles as well. He wrote in the notes that he thought the word had been beginning with a consonant that required the tongue to touch the roof of the mouth, but that this was speculation and that he was not competent to say more.
He wrote the official cause of death as cardiac failure due to exposure to the cold, damp conditions of an underground chamber. He wrote the private cause of death atop the third page as position not accounted for. He did not elaborate.
Rogers Crowley was raised on the bosun's chair by Hendricks and Cyle at the end of Dr. Core's examination. He was carried down the draw on a wagon board and laid out in the front room of the cabin. Junia sat with him through the night. Wilder sat with her. Ansel sat with Petra in the kitchen.
In the small hours of the morning of the sixth of October, Junia rose from the chair and walked to the shelf in the kitchen where Rogers kept the leather journal, and she took it down and she read Rogers's last entry, which had been written the previous morning before he had descended. The entry had been dated the third of October, 1879. It was one paragraph.
It read as follows: I have looked at the band on the east wall this morning through my memory of the last session, and I have understood that what I saw on the twenty-fourth as a two-lift at seven feet north is not a two-lift. I miscounted. I did not miscount because the band was ambiguous. I miscounted because what I was looking at was a lift so much larger than any I have ever seen that my mind refused to name it. It is an eight-lift. That is a magnitude I have never read off. My father said his father had described a five-lift as a matter requiring attention. The old man from further west did not describe anything above a five. An eight is not on the scale. 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 tonight and think about what to do. I do not know what to do about it. I'm going to descend and read it and come back up and think.
Junia read this aloud. Wilder then read it a second time to herself. She said that she was going down to look at the wall. Junia said that she was not. Wilder said that someone in the family had to read the wall, that she was the only one trained, and that if her father had not been able to fully complete the eight-lift count, then it needed to be read now. Junia said no. Wilder did not argue. She waited.
Rogers Crowley was buried in the Bracken Cemetery on the seventh of October. Reverend Orlin Shack of the Methodist Meeting House at Bracken read the service. He wrote a private letter to the Synod in Topeka three days later in which he described the family standing at the graveside and noted that none of the four remaining Crowleys had cried during the service, and that all four had looked, as Shack put it in the letter, at the ground the way a man looks at a door that he knows is going to open again.
He did not know at the time what he meant by writing that, and he wrote as much in the same letter. He would understand it, he wrote, twenty-three days later. The letter went to the Methodist Synod archive in Topeka. It was correctly filed. No one asked for it.
In 1994, a graduate student at Emporia State cataloging nineteenth-century Kansas Methodist correspondence for a dissertation found the letter in a box of routine synod communications from the 1870s and 80s. He read it. He set it aside. He wrote about it in a footnote of his dissertation.
The ninth day after Rogers's descent fell on the twelfth of October, 1879, which was a Sunday. Wilder Crowley rose before the rest of the family, dressed, wrote a two-sentence note on a page torn from her father's journal, and walked to the head of the draw. The note read: I'm going down alone because someone in the family must. I have read the wall for three years, and I know what I'm looking at. She left the note on the kitchen table.
Junia found the note at first light when she came down to start the stove. She woke Ansel, and the two of them ran up the draw. Ansel arrived at the curb first. The windlass rope was let out. The bosun's chair was at the bottom. There was no light showing from the shaft. Wilder had not taken a lantern. She had descended in the dark.
Ansel rigged himself onto the second harness Rogers had built, and Junia lowered him. He carried a lantern that he lit as soon as he was below the level of the topsoil. He descended for something over six minutes, and he entered the room, and he found his sister.
Wilder was kneeling at the west wall directly below the observation hook. Forehead pressed against the stone, arms straight down at her sides, hands open, palms turned outward and backward. Cold through, no wound, mouth open in the shape of a word begun but not finished. She had been dead for something over two hours by Dr. Core's later estimate, meaning she had died within an hour of arriving at the room.
Ansel climbed back up. He told his mother. Junia sent Petra to Bracken again. Petra rode a horse this time. She reached Bracken by early afternoon. Marshal Hendricks and Cyle and Dr. Core rode back out. Core descended and examined the body of Wilder Crowley and drew the position in the same three views he had drawn her father's position in nine days earlier.
He wrote in the private notes that the position was identical to her father's in every particular he had recorded, including the rotation of the palms outward and backward and the shape of the mouth. He wrote that this could not be explained by any medical framework he possessed. He wrote it anyway.
Wilder was raised and carried down and laid out beside her father in the small burial building at Bracken. Reverend Shack delayed her service by a day because Ansel Crowley told him that the family wanted time to think.
On the evening of the fourteenth of October, Ansel Crowley told his mother and his sister that he intended to descend the shaft the next morning and remove the sheet from the hook and burn it in the yard. He said that whatever was in the room was working through the sheet, and that if the sheet was gone, the room could not do what it was doing and the family could go on.
He said that his father had not been able to see this because his father had come to the reading through his own father and grandfather and he had believed in the practice as a family duty, and that his sister Wilder had come to the reading the same way, and that both of them had believed that the reading had to be done. Ansel had not been trained to read. He said that his lack of training was his advantage. He could see the room from the outside. He could see that the room was killing his family. He could see that the sheet was the mechanism and that if the mechanism was destroyed, the machine stopped.
Junia said no. Junia said no with the same firmness she had said no to Wilder on the morning of the fourth. She said that Rogers had understood the room better than any of them, and that Rogers had known that removing the sheet was not an available action, and that Ansel was not going to descend. Ansel did not argue. He waited.
The ninth day after Wilder's descent fell on the twenty-first of October, 1879, which was a Tuesday. Ansel Crowley rose in the night, dressed, went to the head of the draw, rigged himself in Rogers's harness, and descended alone. He carried no lantern. He carried a claw hammer.
Junia found him missing before first light. She woke Petra. She did not send Petra to Bracken. She rode the horse herself. She reached Bracken at about eight in the morning. Marshal Hendricks was already at his office. He listened. He and Cyle and Dr. Core saddled their own horses and rode back out with Junia and Petra following in the wagon.
They reached the head of the draw at about eleven. The bosun's chair was at the bottom of the shaft. The windlass rope was let out. There was no light showing. Hendricks descended. He was in the shaft for six minutes. He was in the room for four minutes. He came back up.
He told Cyle and Dr. Core that Ansel was at the west wall in the same position, and that Ansel was holding the sheet in his right hand. The sinew cord had been broken. Ansel had gotten the sheet down, but Ansel had not gotten out of the room. He had knelt at the west wall directly below the hook with the sheet in his right hand and had died there.
His forehead was pressed against the stone below the hook. His left hand was open at his side, palm turned outward and backward. His right hand was closed around the sheet, and the sheet was undamaged.
Dr. Core descended and examined. He wrote in the private notes that Ansel's right hand had been closed around the sheet with a force that seemed inconsistent with a body that had died of the same non-specific cardiac failure his father and sister had died of. The fingers were not clenched. They were curled around the sheet the way a sleeping man's fingers curl around a spoon he has fallen asleep holding. But the force required to remove the sheet from the hand had exceeded, in Core's estimation, the force that Ansel could have exerted in ordinary life. He noted this without explanation.
Marshal Hendricks took the sheet from Ansel's hand himself. He wrote in the report that he had not known why he did it, but that he had felt that he could not leave the sheet in the hand of a corpse. He carried the sheet up the shaft. He looked at it in the daylight at the top of the curb.
He wrote in the report that the sheet was, in the light of an October morning on the Kansas prairie, still warm to his hand. Not as warm as a stone in the sun. Warm the way a saucer that has held a cup of coffee half an hour earlier is warm. He wrote that this had unsettled him.
He held the sheet for something over an hour, sitting at the top of the curb looking down into the shaft. Then he descended again with it, entered the room, walked to the west wall, tied a new length of hemp string through the drill hole, tied the string to the hook, and put the sheet back exactly where Ansel had taken it from. He did this on his own initiative. He wrote in the report that he had known standing at the west wall that the sheet had to go back on the hook. He wrote that he had not been able to say why. He wrote it anyway.
Ansel Crowley was raised and carried down and laid out beside his father and his sister at Bracken. Reverend Shack read the service on the twenty-third of October. Petra Crowley was fifteen years old and had lost her father, her older sister, and her older brother in the space of eighteen days.
On the evening of the twenty-third, in the front room of the cabin at the mouth of the draw, Junia Crowley sat with Petra and told her what was going to happen. She said that the ninth day after Ansel's descent would fall on the thirtieth of October, and that she intended to descend the shaft on the morning of that day, and that she did not intend to come back up.
She said that she had thought about this in the days between Rogers's descent and Wilder's, and again in the days between Wilder's and Ansel's, and that she had come to a conclusion.
Her conclusion was this. The room was not killing the readers. The room had been reading the ground through the readers for a very long time. The eight-lift count in September had not been the room malfunctioning. The eight-lift count had been what the ground below the room was doing, and the room had reported it accurately, and Rogers had read the report accurately, and there had been nothing wrong with the reading.
What had been wrong was that the eight-lift count required a completion that the family of readers could not give. The Crowleys had come to the practice through the old man from further west in 1809. The Crowleys had not been the family the room had been built to be read by. The room had been built by a much older people, and it had been intended to be read by a family from that older people. And the eight-lift count required an account that only a reader from the older people could provide.
Rogers had gone down on the third of October to read the eight-lift count and had understood, standing at the east wall, that he could not complete the account. Wilder had understood the same thing. Ansel had tried to destroy the mechanism because he had understood that his family could not complete the account, and he had thought destruction would end the problem.
Junia had thought about it, and she had understood that destruction would not end the problem. Destruction would leave the ground below diverging without any account at all, and that would be worse than an account that could not complete.
She said that she was going down on the thirtieth to add her own presence to the account, not as a completion, but as an acknowledgement that the family had received the eight-lift count, had understood that they could not complete it, and had chosen to give what they had to the ground below, rather than to leave the ground unanswered.
She said that she thought this was what her husband and her daughter and her son had done without having had time to think it through as she had. She said that she was going because if she did not go, the ninth day would come, and there would be no reader in the room, and the ground below would understand that the family had walked away, and something would follow the family out of the draw.
She said that Petra was to walk out at first light on the morning of the thirty-first. She was to walk to Bracken. She was to take nothing from the head of the draw. She was to speak to no one on the road. She was to give her account to Marshal Hendricks and to Dr. Core and to Reverend Shack and to Judge Weem, in that order.
She was to name the family and the practice and the room. She was to say what she knew, and she was to leave Stillwater County and never return to Blackroot Draw. She was to go to Wichita, where Junia had a cousin, and she was to stay there, and she was to live her life.
And when she was old, and Junia was buried beside Rogers and Wilder and Ansel in the Bracken Cemetery, and the room had been left alone by everyone in Stillwater County for as many decades as it needed to be left alone, then Petra could, if she wished, write down what had happened to her family in the autumn of 1879. But not before then.
Petra wrote in the manuscript of 1949 that her mother had spoken to her that evening for something over three hours, and that Junia had not cried once during those three hours, and that Petra herself had not cried once. And that at the end of the three hours Junia had gone to the desk and had written a note on a piece of paper and had folded the note into an envelope and had put the envelope on top of the leather journal and had told Petra to carry the note and the journal to Bracken in the morning and give both to Marshal Hendricks.
On the morning of the thirtieth of October, 1879, Junia Crowley rose before Petra, dressed in her ordinary work clothes, drank a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, and walked up the draw to the head. She did not take a lantern. She did not take a note. She had said what she had to say the previous evening. She rigged the harness. She descended.
Petra sat at the kitchen window and watched her mother go, and she wrote in the manuscript that her mother had not looked back.
Petra did not send anyone to Bracken that day. She waited. She had been told to walk out at first light on the thirty-first, and she waited until first light on the thirty-first. She sat in the cabin all through the day of the thirtieth, and she ate nothing, and she drank water from the kitchen pitcher, and she sat with the leather journal on her lap and read her father's entries and her sister's entries and read the letter her mother had left on the top of the journal.
The letter had been the note that Junia had written the previous evening. It read as follows: 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. She will walk out.
Petra folded the letter and put it back on top of the journal. She sat at the window and watched the head of the draw all afternoon. She did not see her mother come up. She had not expected to. At sunset, she ate a piece of bread and a wedge of cheese from the pantry. She slept a few hours on the front room couch with the journal beside her.
She rose at first light on the thirty-first of October, 1879, and she put on her coat and her boots, and she picked up the leather journal, and she walked out of the Crowley cabin at the mouth of Blackroot Draw. She did not look back at the cabin, and she did not walk up to the head of the draw. She walked south on the wagon road toward Bracken, and she reached the marshal's office at a little after ten in the morning of the thirty-first, and she gave the journal and her mother's letter to Marshal Cole Hendricks, and she began to speak.
The inquest before Judge Oliver Weem ran from the thirty-first of October through the fifth of November, 1879. Petra Crowley spoke over three afternoons. Marshal Hendricks filed his report. Dr. Core filed his notes. Reverend Shack filed his letter to the synod.
Judge Weem issued a final order on the sixth of November. The order was two pages. The last paragraph read that the well at the head of the draw was not a matter this court is competent to adjudicate, that it would not be opened or investigated further, that no fence would be built around it, that no marker would be set, that the sheet on the hook was to remain undisturbed, and that anyone descending the shaft would do so without the protection of the county.
Sheriff Rolland Vesk, who succeeded Hendricks in 1885, rode out to the head of Blackroot Draw once every autumn from 1885 to 1897, and stood beside the curb and did not descend. When Stillwater County was dissolved in 1897, the records went to Topeka and the land was leased to the state and passed later 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 Crowley left Bracken on the eighth of November on a wagon south to her mother's cousin in Wichita. She was fifteen. She grew up. She taught school for forty-one years. She never married. She saved enough by 1911 to have proper markers cut for the four graves in the Bracken Cemetery, and she rode up herself and watched them set. She died in Wichita in 1957 at the age of ninety-three.
Her manuscript of 1949 ended with a paragraph she had written six weeks after her eighty-fifth birthday. I was fifteen years old the morning I walked out of the draw and I have been eighty-five for six weeks now. And in the seventy 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 man who receives, if he is still there, is still there. The ground below Blackroot Draw has diverged for 146 years without an account. Whether the ground has settled on its own, or whether the man who receives takes nothing in now, is a question no one intends to answer.