In October 1881, a surveyor named Obadiah Kestrel was hired out of Fort Smith to map parcels of land in the western edge of Washington County, Arkansas, for a railroad company looking to lay track through the lower Ozarks. Kestrel, a forty-four-year-old man with a face that betrayed little and hands calloused from years of holding a transit and chain, took with him a young hired man named Caspian Velum. They left Fayetteville on the twenty-third of October with a pack mule, two weeks of provisions, and a list of section markers to confirm. Before they rode out, the livery keeper warned Kestrel that there were pieces of the country off to the west, called the den country, that were not on the maps.
When Kestrel said he was aware, the man pressed further. He said, “I don’t mean the rocks. I mean the people. ” Kestrel wrote the warning in his notebook and underlined the final word.
On the second night out, they camped at the edge of a clearing. Kestrel noted the wind and the temperature, and in the tighter handwriting he used when uncertain, he noted that dogs could be heard moving somewhere down in the hollow, but not one was making a sound. Caspian told him he had also heard something else, a sound like a woman humming, but lower and slower, with long pauses between notes, as if someone were remembering the melody piece by piece. Kestrel wrote it down and added the words, “We keep working.
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The next day they pushed deeper into the den country. The land folded in strange ways, with caves opening at odd angles from the rock. In the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, Kestrel found a path. It was not a game trail, which meanders, and not an old logging trace, with no stump cuts or wagon ruts.
It was about three feet wide, packed hard, and had been used recently. Kestrel, trained to follow what he was surveying, followed it. For the better part of two hours, the path wound deeper into country that appeared on no map. The trees were old, untouched by any axe, their trunks so thick that two men holding hands could not reach around them.
There were no birds. And there was a smell, not bad, but sweet, like cooked apples and woodsmoke, the kind that comes from a farmhouse kitchen in the fall. There were no farmhouses out there. They stood on the path for a quarter of an hour without speaking.
Then Kestrel said they would camp back along the ridge and return in the morning. Going back, the path was longer than it had been going in. Kestrel had counted his paces on the way down: 1,412. On the way out, he counted twice.
It was 2,090. They made a cold camp on the ridge without a fire, because Kestrel did not want to be seen from below. Neither of them slept much. Caspian wrote a letter to his sister in St.
Louis by the light of a candle stub, and it read, “I do not think we should go back down there tomorrow, but I do not think I can tell him so. ”
They went back at first light on the twenty-sixth. This time Kestrel marked the path with chalk every fifty paces. The count on the way in came out right: 1,412.
Past the point where they had stopped the day before, the path continued for about three hundred more paces and opened into a clearing. Kestrel recorded what he saw in the same level hand he used for elevations: “Settlement, six structures, no smoke, no livestock visible, no sound, population unknown. ”
It was a village. Six buildings arranged around a packed earthen yard, with a stone well in the middle.
The logs of the buildings had grayed with great age, and the roofs were shingled in a style Kestrel had only seen in books about the earliest settlers. The stones around the well were worn smooth by a great many hands over a great many years, and there were fresh footprints in the dust. Kestrel called out a greeting. Nothing answered.
He called again. From inside the largest building, he heard what he wrote was the sound of a chair being pushed back from a table. An old man stepped out, thin to the point of looking like sticks tied together with leather, dressed in clothes that had not been current in Arkansas since before the war with Mexico. His eyes were pale gray, almost white, and they settled on Kestrel like an owl settling on a thing it has decided about.
He gave his name as Ambrose Thrrell. He said his people kept to themselves and did not trade in Winslow because it was a loud town. He said there were fourteen of them. When Kestrel asked, he said they had no young ones.
“Not for a long time,” he said. “We don’t have those here anymore. ” He invited them in for a meal. Inside were eleven people.
Counting Ambrose, that made twelve, fewer than the fourteen he had claimed. All were old. Kestrel could not place any of them under sixty, most under seventy, and several he would have called eighty or more. The youngest-looking person in the room was a thin woman with the same pale eyes who sat at the far end of the table and watched him eat without blinking once.
The meal was stewed apples and a coarse, dark bread with a strong sweet taste he did not recognize. There was no meat. There was no salt. Kestrel noted both absences, and in the margin he placed a question mark after the salt, because salt was the one thing every homestead in the Ozarks kept.
They drank water so clear it looked as if it had been strained. Ambrose did most of the talking. He asked about the railroad, about Fort Smith, and about who the president was now. When Kestrel told him it was Chester Arthur, Ambrose nodded and said, “We had an Arthur once,” and did not say when.
When they were done eating, though it was only the middle of the afternoon, Ambrose stood and said, “You’ll want to be getting back to your camp before dark. ”
At the edge of the yard, Ambrose put one hand on the smooth stones of the well and asked Kestrel, as a kindness, not to mention them when he went back. Kestrel recorded that he gave his word, and he recorded in the margin that he did not intend to keep it. He was a surveyor for the state and the railroad.
He had found an entire settlement that did not appear on any record on land the government believed unclaimed. He intended to report it. They walked back up the path. The count came out to 1,412, just as it should have.
They made camp and lit a fire. In the night, Caspian, on watch, saw a figure come up the path out of the woods carrying something cradled in both arms. It stopped at the edge of the firelight. Its eyes caught the coals like a cat’s.
It stood and breathed slowly, evenly, like a man taking a measurement. The thing in its arms moved, and the figure shifted its grip and stroked the top of it with one thumb, the way you would gentle a thing you did not want to wake. Then it turned and walked back down the path. In the morning, Kestrel wrote, “We will leave for Fayetteville this morning.
Survey suspended. I will report directly to the marshal. ”
They broke camp and walked to where they had left a cache of supplies two ridges over. The cache was gone.
Not scattered or torn into by an animal, but gone. The canvas covering it had been folded neatly, with the corners square, and placed on top of the empty spot. Beneath it lay a single dried apple, centered carefully on the bare ground. They had brought no apples with them on the survey.
There were no apple trees in that timber. It was the same kind of dried apple the village people had stewed for them the day before. Kestrel did not touch it. He placed the canvas back over it and set a heavy stone on top, to mark it, he wrote, for any party who may come looking later.
In the margin he wrote, “They know where we are going. ”
They moved fast and came out of the timber before sunset on the twenty-seventh. Waiting for them on the trail was a farmer named Hosea Trant. He looked at them and said, “You came back out,” as if he had not believed they would.
He asked how many of them they had seen. Kestrel told him twelve at the meal, fourteen by the old man’s count. Trant said there had not been twelve last time anyone came out of there. A trapper three years ago had counted nine, and died of a fever six weeks later, and his wife had burned his journal because what he was writing in it at the end was not Christian.
Trant took them to his house. He told them not to stop in town, not to speak to anyone, and said, “They have people in town. ” Kestrel asked what he meant. Trant did not answer.
In the long evening that followed, Trant told them what he knew. The people in the den had been there before anyone in Winslow. There were two versions of their origin: one said they had come down from Cumberland and done something in the mountains that no Christian people would speak of, and had been sent on alone; the other said they had already been there when the first wagons came through. Trant’s grandfather held the second version.
He said the people of the den looked like nobody, not white men, not Cherokee, not Osage. In the 1830s, there were about thirty of them. In the 1850s, a circuit-riding preacher went to bring them the gospel. He did not come back.
His horse came back, brushed and watered, with the preacher’s leather hatband tied carefully around its neck like a ribbon. During the war, five Confederate irregulars rode in looking for deserters. One came out. He would not say what had happened to the others, and spent the rest of his life in an asylum, saying over and over that the other four were not dead, that he could see them still walking in the den, coming for him slowly, a little closer each year.
The count had gone down every decade. By the trapper’s count three years ago, it was eleven. Now Kestrel was telling him fourteen. Trant said that part he did not understand.
The people of the den brought in no outsiders, not ever, and they had no young ones. But the count was higher than it had been three years before by five. Kestrel took out his notebook. He wrote that the supplies had been taken by people who knew where they were going, who had gone around them in the dark in country with no path.
He wrote, “There are not fourteen of them. There were never fourteen of them. ” He wrote, “I think there are more. ” In the margin, he wrote the last thing he ever wrote in the book: “I think we have been seen by all of them.
I think the village was the only part of themselves they let us see. ”
The next morning, before sunrise, Kestrel left alone on the mule to ride for Fayetteville and make his report. He told Caspian to stay with the Trants. He never arrived.
After three days, Trant and his cousin rode to Fayetteville and found that Kestrel had not been seen. The county marshal, Pleasant Crowder, took the matter seriously. He gathered a posse of six men and rode out on the second of November. Three days into the search, they found the mule tied to a tree a mile inside the timber line.
The mule had been brushed. The saddlebags were intact, holding Kestrel’s bedroll, his transit, his chain, and his notebook. The notebook had been wrapped in clean linen and tied with a length of dark blue ribbon. Trant recognized the ribbon as the kind his wife used on her sewing.
When he went home and checked, a length of that exact ribbon was missing from her box. The posse went deeper into the den. They found the path Kestrel had described and followed it. They counted 1,412 paces, then 5,000.
The path did not end. There was no village, no clearing, no cabins. There was only path. A tracker named Ruben Cardy sat down and refused to go further.
When the marshal asked what he was seeing, Cardy said, “Look at the path. ” The marshal looked, and in his report he wrote that the packed earth bore the prints of feet going both ways, and that the prints in the direction from which they had come were fresher than the prints going the other way. Many people had walked back up this path behind them while they had been walking down. The marshal turned them around.
On the way out, the path was the right length again: 1,412 paces exactly. Kestrel was never found. Not his body, not his coat, not his boots, not the Colt on his hip, not his pocket watch. Nothing of him came back except the notebook the mule had been left holding for them.
Caspian Velum quit the survey trade and returned to St. Louis. He lived another forty-one years. His sister wrote to the historical society after his death that every year of his life from 1881, on the twenty-sixth of October, he sat up the entire night with a loaded rifle across his knees, and would not let anyone else in the house go to bed until the sun was up.
In the last week of his life, with a fever, he asked her repeatedly to count out loud to 1,412. And for forty-one years, on that same date, he took a length of dark blue ribbon out of a small wooden box and laid it on his desk until morning. She said she had buried the ribbon with him. The Trant small holding burned down in the spring of 1883.
Hosea Trant died in the fire. His wife Tabitha survived and moved to Missouri, where she testified that the fire was set, and that it was set by old people who came up out of the den in the night with their arms full. The Devil’s Den is now a state park. The path Kestrel walked is not on any modern map.
But in the records of the Arkansas State Historical Society, in a digitized file, there is a photograph taken in 1934 by a Civilian Conservation Corps surveyor named Wendell Lok. Through the trees, in the middle distance, stands what appears to be a figure, upright, with a beard that comes down past the chest. Lok wrote that he had not seen the figure when he took the picture. When he developed the plate three weeks later, he filed the photograph and requested a transfer to a different project.
He noted that he had developed two other plates from that same day, from the same roll, taken within minutes of the first, and that in both there were also figures, none of them in the same place. He filed all three, with the clearest one on top, so that anyone going through the file would see that one first and might not look further. The other two plates were later lost. Lok wrote that he had done this because he did not want anyone else to have to see the other two.
The people of the Devil’s Den were never accounted for. No descendants came forward. No graves, bodies, or bones were ever found. The cabins, if they were ever real, were never located.
Hosea Trant’s grandson gave one interview to a folklorist in 1959. He said that his grandfather had told him that the worst thing about the people of the den was not what they did to his house. The worst thing was that they had been there longer than there had been a country, and they were going to be there longer than there was going to be a country. And they did not need anything.
His grandfather put it like this: “They keep what they take. ”