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The winter of 1893 in Colorado's San Juan Mountains was one of the harshest on record. Snow covered most of the passes well into late April, isolating the small settlements scattered across the high valleys. In one of those settlements, Creststone Valley, residents began to notice something strange about the hides being delivered by a … Read more

In the Blue Ridge Mountains, there are places where the road grows easy. That is precisely where a person should be most afraid. In the fall of 1893, the Norfolk and Western Railway sent a surveyor named Ambrose Rainer into a remote corner of western North Carolina. He was forty-seven years old, tall and narrow-shouldered, … Read more

In the autumn of 1887, a 34-year-old surveyor named Wendell Crumrine was hired by a coal speculation company out of Philadelphia to map a stretch of unclaimed ridgeland along the border between Eastern Kentucky and what was then still being called West Virginia. The company wanted to know whether the timber was worth cutting and … Read more

In the winter of 1915, a case unfolded in the Missouri Ozarks that would confound the scientific community for decades. It centered on a twelve-year-old girl named Clara Caldwell, whose sudden acquisition of advanced knowledge had no discernible source. The story remains one of the most disturbing yet least known chapters in American scientific history. … Read more

In the winter of 1883, twenty-seven men entered the dense forests of the Pettyroot mountain range in northern Montana. The lumber and fur trades were booming, drawing ambitious men into the wilderness with promises of wealth. Their camp, established near what is now known as Blackwater Creek, was meant to serve as a base for … Read more

In the high coal country, if you walk far enough up the wrong hollow, you will come to a fence. It is old wire on newer posts, with a gate that somebody keeps oiled. Past the gate, set into the side of the slope, is a wall of poured concrete and fieldstone where a mine … Read more