Pondering Past vs. History along the High Line Canal Near Platte Canyon Reservoir
Beneath every history, another history. ~Hilary Mantel
I have been participating this year in a slow read of Hilary Mantel’s excellent historical Wolf Hall trilogy, about Thomas Cromwell and his rise and precipitous fall as a councillor to Henry VIII. In the readings the group has been doing recently as I’ve been mulling over how to put together this installment of the blog, the themes of historical storytelling have come up, and include the quote I open with today. I like the quote a lot, for me it elegantly puts forward a view of history with which I find a lot to agree. What Mantel suggests, here and more explicitly in a Reith Lecture she gave in 2017, is this:
Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.
This is what is on my mind as I attempt to describe for the blog the sites along this segment of the High Line Canal. I have no high notions that what I’m doing on this blog approaches anything so rigorous as “public history,” but what I do set out to do is let people know that this stuff exists out here along the trail, for you to grapple with. To do the best you can do with it, as I am doing my best.
As I arrived one late December morning at Platte Canyon Reservoir, the fog was thick, it was very cold, and the reservoir is large enough to act as a thermal sink, exacerbating the chill. My wife had graciously come with me to enable a shuttle hike, as at 5.2 miles this is the longest segment of the High Line Canal Trail and not the most suitable for an out-and-back morning jaunt, certainly not this day given the conditions.
The men on the Stephen Long Expedition of 1819-1820 arrived here in much the opposite meteorological conditions in the summer of 1820. They were passing through what had already been described some 15 years earlier as a "Great American Desert." Having followed the South Platte across what one member described as "an extensive barren parire, almost as steril as the deserts of Arabia"[sic], they would depart it here where it plunges out of the mountains, to head south and ultimately back east up the Arkansas River to Fort Smith, Arkansas, exploring and documenting the area's geology, botany, and zoology. One member of that trip, the expedition's zoologist Thomas Say, is a name familiar to Colorado birders as his eponymous Say's Phoebe (Sayornis saya) is a common summer resident of our state. The type specimen - the individual first collected and described to science - was collected on the Long expedition near Pueblo, and described decades later by Charles Lucien Bonaparte, who named it in honor of Say.
On July 6th, 1820, that expedition set up camp in a spot very near to where the parking lot for the reservoir now is. In 1999 two researchers, Robert Righter and Chris A. Blakeslee, in pursuit of documenting all the bird species and subspecies first collected and described to science in Colorado, examined the various journals and scholarly publications that resulted from the expedition, particularly the journals of Captain John R. Bell, who was appointed by Long to be the expedition's official journalist. Righter and Blakeslee rely especially on this account to pinpoint the expedition's camp for two nights beginning on July 6 to a point on the slope of the hogback just inside what is today the Chatfield Farms West subdivision, right across the street from the reservoir and canal path. This camp location is of note to bird fans, because that is where the type specimen for Rock Wren was collected, according to Say's original description. Righter and Blakeslee at the time thought the site looked in the late '90s to be too vegetated to be likely Rock Wren habitat, but subdivision aside, it looks about right to my birder's eyes. Certainly I've encountered the species in similar habitat along the hogbacks nearer to my own regular haunts.
(Early 20th-century photograph of the construction of Platte Canyon Reservoir. In the background the hogback where the Long Expedition made camp decades earlier is prominent. Image courtesy of DCL Archives and Local History, Castle Rock, Colorado. Item protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License (CC BY-NC))
As expedition zoologist, and a scholar with a particular interest in entomology, Say (he would later publish the classic three-volume American Entomology, or a Description of the Insects of North America) also collected in this vicinity a species of peculiar arachnid that would become known as the windscorpion, sunspider, or a small handful of other names. These were also the first specimens of this particular creature to be described to science in North America. I personally remember reading stories about members of this same family being encountered by American soldiers deployed in the Iraq war of the early 2000s and assuming they were only found in arid deserts of that part of the world. In fact, Solpugidae species are found on every continent except Antarctica, and inhabit deserts but also arid grasslands such as the one we inhabit. Like many other fearsome-looking invertebrates, they pose little to no threat of harm to humans.
Despite the type specimens having been collected nearby two centuries previously, we would see no Rock Wrens or sunspiders that morning. Given mild weather all winter to that point, I had assumed the water may be open on the reservoir, attracting waterfowl, and thus a boon to the bird list for this project. Alas, stock show weather preceded the stock show itself, and most of the open water short of the really large reservoirs - like Chatfield just to the north - were frozen or mostly frozen over.
There was a tiny amount of open water near the inlet to the reservoir, and there we found a Lesser Scaup, a Double-crested Cormorant, and a good-sized flock of American Crows. High above we spotted a Northern Shrike surveying the surrounding landscape, representing the lone particular target bird I had noted in my pre-trip research.
Regular in the Denver metro area in the winter, Northern Shrikes breed in the far north and migrate to set up winter territories from Canada as far south as Colorado. They are handsome gray birds, very similar in appearance to their cousins the Loggerhead Shrikes that breed on the Colorado plains in the summer. Northern Shrikes trend a little bit larger than Loggerheads, with a beautiful scalloped patterning on the breast and a thinner black eye mask. All shrikes are known colloquially as butcherbirds - the genus name Laniidae is even derived from the Latin for "butcher" - as they are carnivorous songbirds. They will prey on: smaller songbirds, reptiles, rodents/other small mammals, as well as a variety of arthropods. They often will cache food on barbed wire or sharp twigs and leaves, such as yucca. As with raptors, shrikes also expel pellets - bundles of indigestible material like hair, exoskeletons, etc. - from the prey the shrike has ingested. We had never witnessed the behavior before this day, when not only did this bird give us the closest and longest looks at a Northern Shrike we have had to date, but also coughed up a pellet right in front of us.
Enthused about this encounter, but nearly chilled all the way through to the bone from spending so much time near the reservoir, we followed the winding path east and a little bit south above Willow Creek, before turning sharply and heading back to the north. Just at this turn on the other side of the canal sits the Miksch-Helmer cabin, a remnant of Colorado's homesteading era with a connection to perhaps the darkest day in Colorado history. Amos C. Miksch originally came from Pennsylvania and served as a volunteer with the 1st Colorado Cavalry. He saw service in 1862 in the indecisive Civil War battle at Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Indecisive, perhaps, but ultimately the engagement ended the Confederacy's designs on the western United States as the Union forces were able to destroy their supply train.
More darkly, Miksch was present at the Sand Creek Massacre near Eads, in November 1864. He later testified in formal hearings about the massacre, describing in his testimony the atrocities he saw committed by other men - particularly those in the 3rd Cavalry. At the same time, his testimony as recorded is brief. It leaves me wanting to know more: who was Amos C. Miksch, and what was he most concerned with in life? It seems he ascribed at least some level of humanity to the Cheyennes, the Arapaho, and the other tribes of Colorado, but in exactly what ways? How did his world-view fit in with the prevailing attitudes? The time to pursue that line of questioning is unfortunately too limited for me to be able to track it down for this blog - one could spend years in search of it, and come up empty. But I do wonder all the same.
Miksch originally built this cabin and homesteaded here sometime in the late 1860s, "proving up" at the end of 1873 and receiving his patent before later selling the land on to another family. The cabin is now owned by Douglas County, and open only occasionally for tours.
To be honest, the Miksch cabin itself is dwarfed by another very large ranch house immediately north of it. I casually speculate this larger house is where the later generations of the ranching families that took over the original homestead and expanded its holdings set themselves up. At the time of our hike, another building was nearly complete down below the trail near the creek. We couldn't tell if this was an outbuilding or another home, but clearly this land has been put to similar use for around 150 years now.
Ruminating on what we can know of the past, the Sand Creek Massacre, homesteading, and the High Line's contributions to agriculture in the area, one should know there is also a site nearby of a more ancient origin: Lamb Spring Archeological Preserve. The story goes that in 1960 local rancher Charles Lamb set out to excavate a stock pond on his property, at the site of a natural spring. He noticed some bones on the banks of the spring, but as soon as he dug deeper he found more. Stopping to consult with USGS geologists, the bones were identified as Ice Age mammals. Excavations the next couple years by the USGS and the Smithsonian institution turned up paleo-Indian artifacts in conjunction with some of those fossils.
The excavations identified multiple layers to the site, including evidence of a Cody complex paleo-Indian "kill site" containing knives, scrapers, and projectile points in addition to bison bones, dating from around 6,800 years ago. A subsequent investigation in 1980-81 found bones representing at least 30 mammoth, dating to approximately 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, and a paper about the site from that period found that while it was possible that the bones amassed there independent of human interaction, certainly the evidence didn't exclude the possibility that at least some of the bones may have been part of a late Ice Age butchering site. As I understand it, the debate over whether those mammoth bones represent such a site is freighted with significance, as those bones predate the Clovis period, which is the oldest period for which archaeological proof of human presence exists in North America.
Colorado archaeology fascinates me (ok, archaeology in general). I was completely unaware before undertaking this blog that a site as significant as Lamb Spring seems to be exists right here under our noses in the Denver metro. The Lindenmeier site is maybe the most famous and/or important paleolithic site in Colorado/on the Front Range, and one of if not the most important Folsom site in the country, but I feel like most Colorado citizens are completely unaware even of it. I can't make up my mind why these sites aren't more a part of the general consciousness here: is it to do with a general cultural apathy and even antipathy for history/prehistory? Is it rooted in the ambiguous nature of the evidence available?
As we proceeded north from Miksch-Helmer, and as is fairly common in the open terrain we were passing through, birds were fairly few and far between - some Black-billed Magpies, a distant Red-tailed Hawk posted up on a power pole, and the odd grouping of Dark-eyed Juncos or Song Sparrows near some of the scattered private residences. Soon we would cross a couple of busy roads, putting us into a more populated section where we would start seeing more birds, and encounter more signs of Colorado history.
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Sources and further reading
Just for fun: Samuel Seymour's "A View of the Chasm through which the Platte issues from the Rocky Mountains" is as far as I know the first image created of this part of the South Platte. I've seen comparison photographs in at least one book and it remains an incredibly accurate image.
If you're interested in learning more about all the birds first collected and described to science in Colorado, from the Long expedition and otherwise, Righter and Blakeslee's paper Bird Species and Subspecies Discovered for Science in Colorado published in the Journal of the Colorado Field Ornithologists is well worth a read. The DFO program, "200 Miles of Birding in 200 Years" is also worth a watch. Writer Kevin Cook examines a list derived from Thompson G. Marsh's Master's thesis: A history of the first records of all the birds reported to have been seen within the present boundaries of the state of Colorado prior to settlement (Library), with commentary on likelihood that some of the species were actually what has been accepted, as well as some questions - including about the Long expedition - raised about species absent from lists despite passing through suitable habitat at appropriate times of year.
The Journal of Captain John R. Bell, Official Journalist for the Stephen H. Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 1820 (Online) is only the first stop if you want to dive deeper into the Long expedition. For this post I also consulted The Natural History of the Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 1819-1820 (Library) by noted entomologist Howard Ensign Evans, as well as Retracing Major Stephen H. Long's 1820 Expedition: The Itinerary and Botany (Library) by George J. Goodman and Cheryl A. Lawson, which deals especially with the some 700 plants the expedition collected, and gives a glimpse into the ecology of the area before settlers arrived with invasives and other non-native plant species.
When discussing scientific description of species, birds in particular, the issue of eponyms jumps to the forefront of the discourse, especially since the American Ornithological Society announced its intention in late 2023 to move away from eponyms and honorific English common names that some species currently have. As you can imagine, passions run high. A measured look at the history of American ornithology, controversial figures from the past (especially John James Audubon), and a considered stance on the issue can all be found in Kenn Kaufman's The Birds that Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness (Library), a book I really enjoyed in 2024.
David Leatherman's November, 2019 presentation to Denver Field Ornithologists (DFO), "I Like Shrikes (and More)" focuses primarily on Loggerhead Shrikes, but is worth a watch for the exploration of their diets.
For me, the National Park Service at its best is like a giant, geographical, national library that serves one interpretation of our history. For example, you can learn more about homesteading at Homestead National Historical Park in Nebraska. Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site is the most solemn spot in Colorado. To delve deeper into the Sand Creek Massacre, I can't recommend novelist Kevin Cahill's website enough: the transcriptions of primary documents alone are enough to keep one busy for hours, but he also provides a very comprehensive bibliography that's worth examining.
For the findings at Lamb Spring, I consulted Observations on the Late Pleistocene Bone Assemblage from the Lamb Spring Site, Colorado by John W. Fisher, Jr., collected in Ice Age Hunters of the Rockies (Library)
Finally, one location along the canal that I omitted from the main body of this post bears mentioning: Seven Stones Chatfield is an interesting mix of cemetery, botanic garden, curated wildlife habitat, and gathering space. Cemeteries can be intimidating, but this place seems quite inviting and I look forward to retracing my steps some day and checking it out.
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