In the autumn of 1902, a federal land surveyor named Thaddeus Breen emerged from the Wasatch Front in a corner of Juab County, Utah, that had been missing from the county map records for eleven years. He carried a torn page from a bound register, a page written in neat administrative hand, listing thirty-nine women by first and last name, and the number of the stone cell in which each one was held. Three days later, Breen walked into the office of the United States Marshal in Provo, laid the page on the desk, and spoke a single sentence. He said that beneath a settlement no one in Salt Lake had any records of, there was a network of mortar-set stone tunnels running under a dry creek bed; that the women named on the page were, at the time he wrote his report, still alive inside those tunnels; and that the man who held them was not preparing them for mining, or smuggling, or hiding from the church, but was doing something his training as a surveyor gave him no language to describe.

The settlement was called Forks Fold. It lay eleven miles up a side canyon off the main freight road to Levan, in a cleft of the Pavant range, and it had been quietly removed from the Juab County record between 1891 and 1892 by a clerk who said under questioning that he had been ordered to remove it and did not ask by whom. By the time the marshal’s posse reached the Fold on the morning of October 22, 1902, the above-ground settlement was completely empty. The surface houses were cold, the chimneys cold, the animals gone from the barns.

When the posse walked the dry creek bed looking for the entrance Breen had described, they found it on the first try, exactly where his drawing indicated, because whoever had cleared the surface had not bothered to hide the door. What the marshal’s posse found in the tunnels under Forks Fold on October 22 and 23, 1902, became the largest closed federal file in the records of Utah Territory, and it was not opened for sixty-eight years. When the file was opened in 1970 by a graduate student named Bill Horner, the archivist who brought him the box told him, before she set it down, that the previous reader had been a priest, that the priest had read it for only one afternoon, that the priest had left the reading room without taking any notes, without finishing the file, and without ever returning. She said the box had sat on its shelf for forty-one years between the priest and the graduate student.

No one else had requested it. This is the story of the Forks Pit. It is the story of what Thaddeus Breen entered on the afternoon of October 19, 1902, when he slowly followed a twisting column of what he thought was wood smoke to a cleft that appeared on no map, and discovered it was not smoke. It is the story of the thirty-nine women in his records, and the numbers of the stone cells he counted, and what was done to them to keep them there, and the reason the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had quietly tried to find Forks Pit and stop it for nearly a decade.

And failed, because the men who ran it had broken from the church thirty years earlier, and taken with them something older than any part of their creed, and built a system underground to feed it. To understand what happened in the pit in the autumn of 1902, one must go back forty-one years, to a cold week in the winter of 1861, in a stone meetinghouse on the edge of Nephi, where a man named Oren Forks stood during the second hour of the Sunday priesthood meeting and said before forty-three other men that the leadership of the church no longer spoke for the Lord, and that God had revealed to him, Oren Forks, that the Lord was moving the center of His work out of the valley into a hollow in the mountains to the east, and that any man who followed him there would be granted a cell and a responsibility, and any man who would not follow him should not try to stop him. He was asked to sit. He did not.

He was asked to leave the meetinghouse. He did. And fourteen men walked out behind him. By the following Thursday, those fourteen men had packed their wagons, taken their wives and children, struck their names from the parish records, and moved into the side canyon that would be called Forks Pit before the end of the decade.

The church, through the Nephi stake, tried for the first three years to bring them back. Letters were sent up the canyon. Elders went up the canyon. In the autumn of 1864, two messengers went up and stayed four nights in Oren Forks’ own house, and returned on the fifth morning in silence, and never wrote what they had seen, and refused for the rest of their lives to speak of that journey.

One of the messengers, in a letter to his wife three days after his return, used the phrase that the man was being coached by something, and he did not know what it was, but it was not the Lord. Over the next twenty-two years the group grew. By the summer of 1886 they numbered forty-one adults, nineteen men and twenty-two women, and thirty-six children. By the summer of 1896 the group had sixty-seven adults, forty-one of them women, and nearly all of those women had been brought in from outside, from Nephi and Payson and Mona and Levan, some from as far north as Ogden.

In each case the woman’s family back home was told she had taken a job in domestic service in a town to the south. For the first few months the family received letters in a hand resembling hers. After six or eight months the letters stopped. The family would write to the town they thought she was in, and the town would reply that no one by that name was known there.

The family would come to the Nephi stake, and the stake would write to the group, and the group answered every time with the same two-sentence letter in the hand of Hall, Oren Forks’ second son, saying only that the woman in question had chosen the covenant of the group, and no longer wished her family from the valley to contact her. By 1899 the stake president in Nephi, a stonemason named Matthias Denwood, had thirty-one such letters in a locked wooden box in his office. He had met thirty-one families. He decided, at the end of a Thursday evening in April, to go up the canyon himself with four of his high priests, to enter the group on the basis of their covenant with the Lord, and to bring back any woman who wished to return.

He wrote in his personal diary that night that he was afraid, and that he had asked his wife that evening in the kitchen to pray for him by name, and she had looked at him across the table and said yes, and then said, in a voice he had not heard from her in twenty years of marriage: “Do not go up there, Matthias. Send the sheriff. Do not go up there yourself. ” He did not write what he said in reply.

The next morning he saddled his horse and rode up the canyon. Matthias Denwood did not come back. His four priests did not come back. Their horses did not come back.

In the second week of May 1899, the stake clerk sent a telegram to the United States Marshal in Provo. The telegram, still extant in the marshal’s office log under the heading of May 12 of that year, read in full: “Five of our brethren went up to Forks Fold and did not return. We request immediate federal intervention. There is evil in that place beyond our power to deal with.

” The marshal, a man named Hinshaw, read the telegram twice, folded it, put it in the drawer of correspondence he did not answer, and took no action, because the area was not technically surveyed land, not technically a town, not within the jurisdiction of any county the marshal served, and because Hinshaw, by his own later admission in a letter to his successor dated 1903, was afraid to go. Nothing happened for another three years. The families’ letters kept arriving at the stake. The stake kept writing to the Fold.

The Fold kept answering in Hal Forks’ two-sentence hand. The five brethren of Denwood’s group were not mentioned in open church meetings, but their wives were quietly supported from church stores. And the brother who kept the church record, a bachelor cooper named Eilam Ketch, drew beside each of the five names, in brown ink, a small Hebrew letter nun, and when a researcher asked him about it decades later, he said he drew it because the Hebrew nun was the letter that in old rabbinic commentaries stood for a man taken down to the pit whose name had not yet been added to the dead. In the first week of October 1902, a federal surveyor from the Washington office named Thaddeus Breen, forty-one years old, a Union veteran of Antietam, trained in topography at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, tasked with fixing county survey lines in the towns east of Juab, left Nephi by the north road, took the Levan freight road east, and at a point he logged as the mouth of an unnamed canyon, left the freight road because from the saddle of his horse he saw, about two miles into the cleft, a column of smoke rising slowly not from a chimney but from the ground, and because the 1891 Juab County map in his saddlebag showed no settlement, no house, no road, no property claim in the canyon he was looking at.

Breen tied his horse at the mouth of the canyon. He did not ride in. He walked. He wrote in his notebook that he walked because the canyon from ground level did not look suitable for a man on horseback.

The cleft narrowed quickly. The walls rose sharply on the north and south sides, and the dry creek bed ran straight down the middle with willow brush along it and scattered pines and junipers on the slopes. He walked a mile and a quarter up the dry creek by his own count, and at the end of that distance the creek turned sharply north around an edge of eroded red sandstone. When Breen rounded the edge, he saw Forks Fold for the first time.

He made the first entry of what would become the Fold notebook on the back of a mail envelope in his coat pocket. The entry was four lines. It read: settlement in the canyon but not on the county map, about 23 buildings, two of stone, the rest wood, no road leading in or out that I can see from here. No cattle in the yards, no smoke from any chimney.

The smoke column I saw from the freight road comes out of a stone structure near the creek like a grain silo, but it has no door on the south side and no windows on any side. Breen was a cautious man. He had served thirty-eight months in the Union Engineer Corps and had been almost continuously in the field for twenty-nine years. He wrote in his notebook after the four-line envelope entry that he realized within a minute of passing the sandstone edge that Forks Fold was not an abandoned settlement.

He knew because the yards were swept. He knew because the fences were in good repair. He knew because while he stood at the edge, he could hear a bucket drawn from a well on the far side of one of the wooden houses. After the bucket was drawn, he could hear a wooden door closed.

He waited at the edge for forty minutes. He saw no one. The bucket was not drawn again. The chimneys stayed cold and the slow smoke column kept coming out of the stone granary at the creek in a thin gray spiral with no smell Breen could identify.

He wrote in his notebook: “The column rises straight for about 40 feet above the roof of the stone building and then dissipates in the air in a manner like the exhalation of lungs rather than the smoke of a fire. ”

He walked toward the stone building. It faced north toward the cracked wall. It was built of dressed sandstone blocks, each block a size one man could carry, set so tightly that Breen could not insert his knife blade between any two of them.

The building was square, about twenty feet to a side, with a flat roof of oiled planks and a single door in the north face and no windows. The door was closed and had no handle on the outside, only a smooth iron plate flush with the planks. The smoke column came out of a round hole in the center of the roof, about six inches across. Breen circled the building twice.

On the second circuit, he found on the ground against the east wall a page from a bound register. The page was folded into four parts. The paper was high-quality rag, cream-colored with blue rules and a thin red margin, the kind used in fine hotel registers in the eighties and nineties. The page was torn at the binding.

He opened the page where he stood and read it. When he finished reading it, he put it inside the inner pocket of his coat under his wallet, and walked as fast as a man can walk without running back down the dry creek to the mouth of the canyon, then mounted his horse and rode back to the freight road. From the freight road he rode to Nephi, arriving about four in the afternoon of October 19, 1902. He did not stop.

He changed horses at the livery and rode through the night. Minutes before noon on October 20, he reached Provo, entered the United States Marshal’s office, sat down, and did not speak for a full minute. Then he took the page from his coat, laid it on the desk, and said: “I need to tell you what I believe this is. ”

The page Breen laid on the marshal’s desk on the morning of October 20, 1902, was, as the marshal later confirmed by comparing it with the bound register from which it had been torn, page 141 of the inner register of Forks Fold.

The outer register of the Fold, which Breen never saw, was kept in an office in the wooden meetinghouse on the surface, and contained the names of the men and their wives in good standing, their children, and their supervisory assignments. The inner register was kept in a separate volume bound in black calf, written in a different hand, and contained the names of the women held underground. Page 141 was the last page filled, during the second week of September 1902, about five weeks before Breen found it. The page listed thirty-nine names.

Each name was written in the same clerical hand. Each name was followed in the same hand by two notations. The first was a stone number from one to thirty-nine. The second was a date, which the marshal recognized as the date the woman had been brought in from outside.

The earliest date on the page was October 11, 1891. The most recent date was August 28, 1902, meaning that the newest of the thirty-nine women had been in the underground system for forty-seven days when Breen found the page. The marshal read the page down. Stone one, Vesta Bailey, taken October 11, 1891.

Stone two, Elvira Mund. Stone three, Loretta Branch. Stone four, Darnell Oss. He kept reading down the list.

Stone ten, Verlene Maud, taken July 28, 1893. The marshal stopped at the name Verlene Maud. Verlene Maud was his wife’s second cousin from Payson. He had been told in the summer of 1893 that Verlene Maud had gone into service in Richfield.

Her mother received letters from Richfield for a year, then the letters stopped. Her family had not seen Verlene Maud in nine years and three months. The marshal laid the page on the desk, stood, walked to the window, stood for about two minutes, then came back to the desk and read the rest of the page. Stone sixteen, Rellma Oss, the same family name as stone four, Darnell Oss.

He noted that in the margin of a legal pad he kept while reading. Stone seventeen, Ender Bailey, a second Bailey name on the page. Stone twenty, Kata Forks, taken February 10, 1896. When the marshal read “Kata Forks,” he stopped again.

Because Forks was the name of the founder of the settlement, and the abduction of a woman named Forks into the inner register of her own husband’s settlement meant that what was happening in the Fold was not merely men holding strangers, but something that by 1896 had turned to include the founders’ own women. The marshal wrote in his pad, in capital letters: “WIVES TOO ARE INSIDE. ” He kept reading. Stone twenty-six, Lavina Bailey, a third Bailey name.

Stone thirty, Birdie Denwood, taken August 1, 1898. When the marshal read the name Birdie Denwood, he put the pen down and did not pick it up for some time, because Birdie was the daughter of Matthias Denwood, the Nephi stake president, who had gone up the canyon in April 1899 and not returned. And the date in the inner register meant Birdie had been in the tunnels eight months before her father went up looking for her. And that whatever had been done to Matthias Denwood and his four priests on that April day in 1899 had been done by men who at that moment were holding the stake president’s own daughter in a cell beneath their feet.

Stone thirty-three, Mehitabel Forks, taken April 3, 1899, the week Matthias Denwood went up the canyon. Meaning a second Forks woman, the wife of Hall, Oren Forks’ oldest son, had been taken by the Fold’s own men in the seven days Denwood and his priests disappeared. The marshal wrote in his pad: “SOMETHING CHANGED THAT WEEK. ” Stone thirty-nine, Novell Bailey, taken August 28, 1902.

A fourth Bailey name and the most recent, underground for forty-seven days at the moment Breen found the page. The marshal finished reading. He looked at Breen. He said: “How do you know they are still alive?

” And Breen answered: “Because of the smoke. ” Breen explained in the marshal’s office that morning what the smoke was. He had in his notebook a drawing of the stone building and the column. He explained to the marshal that the column rising from the roof of the stone building at Forks Fold was not fire smoke.

Breen said it was the breath of a group of human beings. He laid out his reasoning. The column was warm but not hot. A wood fire would have been hot.

A coal fire would have been hot. The column was no warmer than a man’s exhalation on a cold morning. The column had no smell. Wood smoke has a smell.

Coal smoke has a smell. The column had a slight humidity like human breath and nothing else. The column pulsed. It did not rise at a steady rate as a fire does.

It rose in slow waves with about fifteen seconds between peaks, slower than human breathing but consistent with the breathing of a body at rest. And finally he said: “The column rose folding into itself in a slow-turning spiral consistent with an open well from above and a volume of air below warmed by many bodies. ” Breen said the stone building was not a granary. It was a chimney.

What it released was the air of a suite of rooms under the dry creek bed, rooms that had enough heat from enough bodies to keep their air warmer than the ground, rising steadily in a slow spiral through the roof of the stone building into the mountain sky in a column visible from the freight road two miles away. The marshal asked him how many bodies it would take to make a column that size. Breen said he had done the arithmetic in the saddle. A six-inch orifice breathing at the rate he had observed, with a ten-degree temperature difference between the rooms and the surface, would carry the exhalation of forty to fifty resting adults.

If the inner register listed thirty-nine women, and if, say, three or four men were below to tend them, then the column was exactly the size that register would predict. He said the column was, in his estimate, a direct material confirmation of the register. The register was not a planning document. The register was a running inventory.

And Breen said that inventory was alive. The marshal put on his coat. He went into the next room where the chief deputy was. He said: “Finn, raise a posse of twenty men, armed and mounted, with three days of provisions, to muster at the north livery by five this evening.

” The deputy looked at him, but Finn did not ask. By five that evening nineteen armed, mounted men stood in the north livery outside Provo, the marshal arrived at quarter past five with Breen, and the twenty-one of them rode out of Provo onto the Nephi road under a sky turning the color of iron. They rode through the night. They changed horses in Nephi at quarter to four in the morning of October 21.

They reached the mouth of the unnamed creek minutes after seven in the first gray morning light, with mist on the stream and frost on the willows. The marshal left two of his men at the mouth with the horses. The rest walked the dry creek in file, Breen second from the front, in silence, because the marshal had forbidden any talk on the way until they were inside the Fold. They walked the mile and a quarter.

They rounded the eroded red sandstone edge. They saw the Fold. The Fold was empty, as Breen would later write, like a bed just left by its occupant. The yards were clean and swept.

The fences were in good repair. The chimneys of the wooden houses were cold. The animals were gone. The door hinges of the barn moved with the cold morning drafts in a slow sound.

And the smoke column rising from the roof of the stone building was gone. The roof of the stone building was cold. The air above the roof was still. Nothing that had been breathing through the hole in the roof was breathing through it on the morning of October 21, 1902.

The marshal, standing beside Breen at the edge, said one sentence that was recorded in his report later because Breen wrote it down. The marshal said: “They have shut the system down. ” He did not mean that those in the Fold had abandoned the system. He meant that whoever ran it, having received warning of a federal posse coming, had emptied the rooms under the dry creek and moved the thirty-nine women elsewhere.

The marshal was wrong in that, though he could not know it yet. The marshal was wrong because of what the posse found when they opened the north door of the stone building. The north door of the stone building was closed when the posse reached it, but it was not barred. The iron plate on the north face, flush with the planks, turned out to be a blind.

The real latch was inside the chimney opening on the roof, a lever a man could reach by standing on another man’s shoulders and reaching with a stick. One of the deputies, a wiry Welshman named Cadoc Palas, climbed onto the shoulders of the man beside him and tripped the lever with the barrel of his rifle. The north door swung inward under its own weight, and the marshal entered the stone building. The interior of the stone building was almost completely empty.

The floor was paved with sandstone slabs. There was no furniture. There was no fireplace. In the center of the floor was a concealed door of two heavy oiled oak planks, flush with the tile, with an iron ring set into the center of each plank.

The chimney opening in the roof, as seen now from inside, opened into a brick-lined shaft running past the ground-floor ceiling, and Breen realized from the quality of the sound when he spoke under it that it ran far below ground, down to the system beneath the dry creek. The chimney opening was not a chimney at all. The chimney opening was an air return vent. Finn took the iron ring on the east plank.

The marshal took the iron ring on the west plank. They lifted the two planks together. The planks rose easily. They set them aside.

Under the planks was a precisely cut sandstone stair descending into darkness. The stair was dressed and polished. Breen noted later in his report that the steps were worn, with that slight depression made by twenty years of footfall on stone. He counted the steps from the top.

There were forty-one. At the bottom of the forty-one steps was a tiled landing, and from it a corridor ran south, cut in the sandstone itself, the four walls polished, plastered where natural fracture had required repair, and lit, as the posse saw when their lamps reached the landing, by shallow stone niches spaced at intervals along both walls, each niche holding a brass oil lamp with a glass chimney, and every lamp was lit. And every lamp was full, trimmed and maintained within the last forty-eight hours. Casper Finn, standing at the foot of the forty-first step, said to the marshal: “They are still here.

” The marshal said nothing. The posse moved down the corridor in a narrow file. The marshal and Finn led, Breen and three deputies behind them, the rest behind carrying their lanterns high. The corridor ran about ninety feet with no doors and no side passages, then opened into a round chamber about thirty feet across with a vaulted sandstone ceiling, a paved floor, and three more corridors branching from it, one east, one south, one west.

The round chamber was bare of furniture, but it was not empty. In the center of the floor was a circular stone basin about four feet across, filled to within one inch of its rim with dark, still water. The water made no sound. There were no fish, no plants, no bubbles, no sign of flow in or out.

The water was so still that the deputies’ lanterns reflected in it like perfect gold coins. The marshal walked to the basin, bent, and dipped his finger in. He said: “Cold. ” Breen bent beside him.

Breen wrote in his report that the water was close to the temperature of a human body in deep sleep. It was not cold as a mountain spring is cold. It was cold as a body is cold three hours after the fire goes out. They moved on.

The marshal chose the east corridor first. The east corridor ran about forty feet, then widened into a long rectangular chamber sixty by twenty feet with a stone floor and vaulted ceiling, and along each long wall ten doors of dressed sandstone flush with the wall. Each door had a small square iron grate at eye level and no handle on the outside. Each of the twenty doors was numbered in carefully carved numerals in the sandstone of the threshold, from stone one to stone twenty.

The marshal walked to stone one. He put his face to the grate. He spoke a single word that Breen recorded in his report. The marshal said: “Vesta.

” No answer came from the grate. The marshal said: “Vesta Bailey. ” No answer came from the grate. The marshal stepped back and said to Finn: “Break it.

” Casper Finn and two deputies, using a crowbar they had brought from the horses, broke the lock of stone one. The lock was on the inside, which was unusual, a simple latch seated in two iron rings. The latch came out after four hard pulls, and the door swung inward, and the marshal entered, Breen following. What they saw in the first cell of the inner register of Forks Fold was the thing that was sealed in the federal file in 1902 and not opened for sixty-eight years.

What was in the first room when the marshal and Breen entered with the lantern on the morning of October 21, 1902, was a chamber eight feet by eight by eight, with dressed sandstone walls, a paved sandstone floor, and a mortared sandstone ceiling. No window, no second door, no stove, no bed in the sense the people of Provo understood it, and in the center of the chamber a low stone bench six feet long, two feet wide, and one foot high, flush with the floor as if carved from the native rock when the chamber was dug. On that bench lay Vesta Bailey. Vesta Bailey was alive.

She lay on the bench on her back. She wore a loose white cotton dress of the kind called in that part of the country an endowment gown. Her hair was black shot with gray, long and combed. Her eyes were open.

She was not asleep. She was staring at the ceiling. When the marshal entered the door, she did not turn her head. When Breen came into her field of view with the lantern, she did not blink.

The marshal knelt beside the bench and called her name. She did not answer. He called her name again. She did not answer.

He put his hand on hers. Her hand was warm. He took her pulse. He found it within seconds.

He wrote in his report that her pulse was slow and regular as a sleeping body’s, that her skin was warm, her breathing quiet and shallow and regular, that there was no mark of mistreatment on her body, no bruises, no cuts, no bedsores, no marks of restraint, that her nails were trimmed and her hair combed within the last day, and that she was in every respect, by his examination, physically sound, except that she was awake and unresponsive. She was awake. The marshal and Breen both noted it. Her eyes tracked the lantern when Breen moved it slowly side to side across the room, and tracked it back when he moved it the other way.

She simply was not willing or able to speak, or turn her head, or acknowledge that the two men standing in her cell were not part of the ceiling. The marshal said to Breen, in an audible voice: “I do not understand what has been done to her. ” Breen said: “Nor I. ” Then the marshal said: “We are taking her out of here.

” He passed one arm under her shoulders and one under her knees, and she did not resist and did not help, and he lifted her off the bench and carried her out of the first cell and set her gently on the stone floor of the corridor, propping her back against the wall between stone one and stone two. She sat where he placed her. She did not fall. She did not slump.

She did not change her gaze. Her head stayed in the position he had set it, looking down the corridor from where they had come, eyes open. Finn, in the corridor, broke the lock of the second cell. In the second cell was Elvira Mund.

In the third cell was Loretta Branch. In the fourth cell was Darnell Oss. By the time the deputies had opened the first ten cells of the east chamber, and by the time Breen had examined each woman for pulse and breath and reaction, the marshal had understood what the Fold had done. The thirty-nine women listed on page 141 of the inner register were all alive.

They were all adults between eighteen and forty-eight. They were all washed, dressed, fed, and watered, and placed on a stone bench in a clean cotton gown. They all had that slow, steady tracking of the eyes of a conscious person. None of them would or could turn their heads toward the speaker, or answer when called by name, or focus on a face, or respond to a hand placed on theirs.

They all had the pulse of a resting adult. They all had the body temperature of a resting adult. They had all been in someone’s care for the entire span of the dates in the register, which in the case of Vesta Bailey was eleven years and ten days. Casper Finn, after the tenth cell of the east chamber was opened, sat down on the stone floor and put his face in his hands and did not rise for about five minutes.

The marshal said nothing to him. The marshal and Breen returned to the round chamber with the still water, and the marshal said to Breen: “By this water, I say I have never heard of such a thing. ” Breen said: “No one has. ” The marshal said: “Then what is it?

” Breen said: “I believe it is older than the Fold. ” The marshal said: “What do you mean? ” Breen said: because the room with the water is older than the stair. The water is in a basin whose rim is worn about half an inch by use at the places where a person stands to kneel at it.

Sandstone is a soft stone, but it does not wear by itself. People have been kneeling at that basin for a long time. Not for twenty years. For a long time.

The stair above us is new. The corridor is new. The cells are new. The water, the vaulted chamber, the basin, those are old.

The sect did not build this place. They found it. And when they found it, they built the stair, the corridor, and the cells, and began putting women in it. The marshal said: For what?

Breen said: To feed it. The marshal said: Feed what? Breen said: I do not know, but look at them. They are kept the way a body is kept when something is slowly drawn from it over years, in a way that does not injure the body and does not kill it, but takes from it something that has no name among us.

I know when a thing is designed to take a running intake, and this is a system designed to take a running intake, and that intake is drawn from these women, and the sect has run it for eleven years, and the water in the basin has been running for far longer than that, perhaps since before any white man came to these mountains. The marshal did not answer. He walked back through the east corridor and knelt beside Vesta Bailey, who was still sitting where he had placed her with her back to the wall, looking down the corridor from where they had come. He called her name again, and she did not answer him, and he said: “Vesta, we are taking you home.

” And she did not answer him. They did take her home. They took them all home. The posse worked through the rest of October 21 and all of October 22 bringing the thirty-nine women out of the system under Dry Creek, up the forty-one stairs, into the wooden houses on the surface where fires were lit in every stove, water was heated, the women were covered with blankets, and kept under watch.

They worked quietly and without talk. By the evening of October 22, a string of wagons from Nephi, summoned by Ryder the day before, arrived headed by Elson Birch, a quiet man and Matthias Denwood’s successor in the presidency. The women were loaded, two to a wagon, with a deputy or an elder sitting beside each, and moved in a slow train down the freight road to Nephi. From Nephi, on the morning of October 23, they were moved to Provo, where the territorial asylum was cleared of its other patients to receive them.

Thirty-nine women were brought out of the cells of Forks Fold between the morning of October 21 and the evening of October 22, 1902. Twenty-three of them never spoke another word for the rest of their lives. Nine of them began to speak again within the first three months of their release, but they spoke only the names of their mothers, husbands, and children, in the manner of one calling to a person who is not there across a room, and used no other words. Four of them were able within six weeks to speak in full sentences, returned to naming their birthplaces, naming their husbands, and recognizing their children when brought to them.

Three of those four died within a year. The fourth, Verlene Maud, the marshal’s wife’s cousin from Payson, who was in stone ten of the inner section and held for nine years and three months, lived another forty-four years, died in Payson in the spring of 1946 at seventy-nine, bore three more children, kept a home garden and kept bees, and never spoke a word about what was done to her in the cells, except once, in 1931, to her eldest daughter, who was seventeen then, helping her mother shell beans in the kitchen in late summer, when Verlene Maud said, without being asked: “There was something in the water in the middle room, and that something could reach your mouth without opening it, and could pull something from under your tongue, and it did this for a few minutes every day, and then it was done, and went away, and the days you got used to, but the nights you did not get used to, because at night that something was in the walls, and you could feel it in the walls on the other side of your bench moving. ” The daughter wrote that down that night on the back of a school notebook. The board is in the special collections at Weber State University in Ogden, in a file titled “Maud Family Papers,” and Bill Horner first read it in 1970.

Of the thirty-nine women, four were never identified by their families, because they had been brought from outside the Nephi area and no one in the valley could tell the territorial asylum their identities. The asylum’s superintendent, a Catholic nun of the Sisters of the Holy Cross who had come to Provo from South Bend, Indiana, in 1898 to run the maternity ward, Sister Mary Donovan, gave those four names, and registered them in the asylum log as Mary Alpha, Mary Beta, Mary Gamma, and Mary Delta. The four were eventually buried under those names in the Catholic section of Provo City Cemetery, which Sister Mary Donovan had purchased with a small inheritance from an aunt in Indianapolis the year before. Of the sixty-seven adults living on the surface of Forks Fold on an August evening in 1902, forty-one women and twenty-six men, the forty-one women were in the cells underground on the morning of October 21, while the twenty-six men of the Fold disappeared and were never found, identified, or traced in the 124 years since.

Not one of the twenty-six men was ever found. Not in Utah, not in Idaho, not in Nevada, not in Mexico. The search party scoured the surrounding country for three weeks and found nothing. The territorial office in Salt Lake telegraphed the names and descriptions to the marshals of thirty-one counties in six states and two territories, and no reply came from any of them.

Oren Forks, the founder, sixty-eight in October 1902, his eldest son Hall Forks, forty-one, his second son Mescal Forks, thirty-seven, and the other twenty-three men listed in the outer register of the Fold simply disappeared from the records of the United States. Where did they go? The marshal, in his report filed in Provo at the end of October 1902, offered three theories, which he said he could prove none of. The first was that the men of the Fold, hearing of Breen’s departure, had loaded wagons and left the canyon by a route Breen had not seen, scattering under assumed names.

This was the theory the marshal considered most likely, but he could not confirm it, as no trace of such a group appeared on any road the pursuit party worked in the three weeks after. The second theory was that the sect’s men had taken to the mountains themselves and were living in late October in brush and rock shelters, waiting for the pursuit party to withdraw. This was investigated in the spring of 1903 by a party of twelve from Nephi who combed the Pavant range south of the Fold for six weeks and found no trace. The third theory was the one Breen kept private, and did not include in his own report, but wrote in a letter to his sister in Washington, D.

C. , in the first week of December 1902, which read in full as follows. “I believe the men of the Forks sect went down into the system under the dry creek, past the rooms where we found the women, into the deeper passages we did not open, and are still in those passages and will not come out. I believe this because I noted on the morning of the 21st that the dust on the floor of the round chamber with the water had been scuffed in a particular way in two long drags toward the south corridor, and I believe those drags were made by the heels of men being carried into the south corridor by other men who then came back for more men until all were carried, and then the last of them walked in and closed from inside a door we did not look for.

But I cannot prove it. I did not look for that door. We had to get the women out, and I am in Washington, D. C.

, and no one will go back down that south corridor on the strength of a letter from me. ”

They did go back, in the spring of 1903, on the authorization of the United States Attorney for the Territory, with a party of eighteen led by Marshal Hinshaw, carrying thirty-two lanterns and two hundred feet of marked rope. They took the south corridor and walked it slowly in file for a distance of 841 feet, and eventually came to a wall of dressed sandstone closing the corridor from floor to ceiling, with no door, no crack, no mark upon it. Before the wall, on the paved floor, in a semicircle facing the wall, were twenty-six benches of sandstone of the same low type as those in the cells above.

On each bench lay a clean, folded white cotton gown. There were no bodies. There were twenty-six folded gowns. The gowns had been placed carefully.

And on the wall in the center, at eye level, was a single word carved into the sandstone, in a hand Breen later recognized as that of Hall Forks, the hand that had written every outward letter of the Fold. The word was “Given. ”

The federal file on the Forks sect was sealed on November 14, 1902, by Judge Loris Bell of the Third District in Salt Lake, on the joint request of the United States Attorney for the Territory, the First Presidency of the Church through its attorney Charles W. Penrose, and the legal department of the Union Pacific Railroad, which had an interest because the Levan freight line passed four miles from the mouth of the creek.

The joint motion asked that the file be sealed in full for sixty-eight years, after which it was to be reviewed by the chief judge of the district at that time to determine whether the seal should be continued or lifted. The stated grounds of the motion were that the matters pertaining to the Fold, if made public, would cause needless distress to the relatives of the surviving women, would do general injury to the Church, which had been trying by its own means to find the Fold and stop it for a decade before the federal party arrived, and would give the citizens of the Territory knowledge of something the three parties could not in good conscience explain because they did not understand what it was and did not wish to invite public speculation that would in all likelihood be worse than the thing itself. Judge Bell, in his order dated November 14, granted the motion in full, sealed the file for sixty-eight years, and added in his own hand at the bottom of the order a short paragraph that was unusual in sealing orders. The paragraph read: “This court is convinced that in that creek there is something older than any citizen of this Territory, and that the public of this Territory has nothing to gain and much to lose by knowing it.

” “And it is the hope of this court that when this file is next opened, sixty-eight years from now, the judge who opens it will find a world so changed that this fear has turned to curiosity, and that the file will be read by a man who can bear it. ” “I am not that man. ”

The file lay in the vault of the Third District in Salt Lake for forty-one years. Then, in the autumn of 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, a Catholic priest named Father Patrick Horrigan, of the Salt Lake City diocese, then serving as chaplain to the Catholic nuns at Holy Cross Hospital, applied in his own name to the Third District for permission to review the file.

Permission was granted within the chief judge’s lunch hour in a handwritten note on the back of a court envelope by Chief Judge Simmons, who had been a seminary classmate of Horrigan’s cousin in Philadelphia twenty years earlier. Horrigan went to the basement on the afternoon of September 11, 1943. He read for about four hours. He took no notes.

He left the basement at 6:30. He did not return. He walked across the street to the cathedral. He never said Mass again.

Within the week he requested transfer to a monastery in Oregon, which was granted. He died in that monastery in 1958. His personal papers, which were few, contained no reference to the file. Bill Horner, the graduate student, was a doctoral candidate in Mormon history at the University of Utah in 1970.

He had come across a reference to a sealed file in a footnote to a 1928 law review article, and out of curiosity applied to see it, which was granted automatically because the sixty-eight-year seal had expired. He read the file in the Third District basement over three afternoons in July 1970. He took eight pages of notes. He did not finish his dissertation.

He changed fields. He joined the Utah State Water Engineer’s office, where he worked for the rest of his career, and died in 1999. After his death, his widow deposited his eight pages of notes in the Marriott Library at the University of Utah in a volume titled “Horner Research Notes 1970,” which eleven researchers have read in the thirty-six years since. The eleven researchers did not write about it.

Four of them wrote private notes for their personal files and published nothing. Three of them gave short lectures in closed graduate seminars at Utah State, Weber State, and the University of Utah, none of which were recorded. One of them, Margit Haughard of Weber State, mentioned the Forks file in a single sentence in a 2021 review article on the sealing authority of district courts in the Mormon West. That single sentence read in full: “The Forks sect of Juab County in 1902 is a case in which a judge, an attorney, and a church stated plainly that they closed a file not from shame but from a shared conviction that something in that sealed place was older than them and greater than them.

” End of sentence. Haughard has not written about the Fold since. The other three researchers have written nothing, and when asked, declined to explain why. The Fold itself still stands.

The surface settlement is ruins. The yards are overgrown. The wooden houses have collapsed. The stone building above the dry creek still stands, roofless, the chimney opening open to the sky.

No trace remains of the secret door in the floor. The forty-one steps descend to a corridor that is still dry, lit, in a manner of speaking, by dusty daylight falling through the opening toward a round chamber with a sandstone basin in the center, which, when the last known visitor saw it in 2005, was half full of dark still water. The visitor was a geologist from Brigham Young University named Alcuin Foss, who entered alone without permission, with a flashlight and a camera, took three photographs of the basin, walked through the east and west cell chambers which were empty, then came back up the forty-one steps and wrote in his field notebook: “I did not take the south corridor, and I will not come back here, and I will not tell my students about this place. ” He kept that promise.

He still works at Brigham Young. The three photographs are in his office. He refuses to show them. He is, by his own count, the forty-first person since 1902 to descend the forty-one steps of the Forks Fold, and so far, the last.

One additional document deserves mention. In the autumn of 1903, about a year after the posse had gone up the slope, Thaddeus Breen, from Washington, D. C. , wrote a letter to the First Presidency of the Church in Salt Lake.

The letter bore the date October 19, 1903, the anniversary of the day he had walked through the cut. The letter ran eleven pages in Breen’s neat hand on blue ruled government paper. It was answered on November 4 by the secretary to President Smith, Charles W. Nebeker, in a very brief reply, thanking Breen for his service, and expressing the hope that God would in His mercy in due time give him peace in his heart about what had happened in Juab.

The letter itself, Breen’s eleven-page letter, was deposited in the First Presidency’s archive in the Church Office Building in Salt Lake, where it remained in a file marked “Forks Fold Breen” until 2007, when the file was moved to the Church History Library across the street, and placed there on restricted shelves available to accredited researchers on application. Nine accredited researchers have read the letter since 2007. Margit Haughard read it. The last to read it, in late August of 2025, was a doctoral student at the University of Utah named Alison Bailey, a great-great-granddaughter of Vesta Bailey, who had been in stone one, and who did not know her ancestor had been in the Fold until she applied in 2022 to the Marriott Library for the Horner notes.

The letter is in Breen’s own words. In the letter, Breen writes that since October of the previous year he has been unable to sleep more than four hours a night. Breen writes in his letter that he has seen in his dreams the still water in the round chamber, and that the water in the dreams is a mouth, and that the mouth in the dreams speaks a word he cannot catch, and cannot remember on waking, but that when he is in the dream, he understands the word, and the word in the dream is a kind of agreement, a contract between what is in the water and those who bring to it, the bodies. He says he writes this because he has come to the conclusion that what is in the Fold is of a kind that is not stopped by opening passages or breaking walls, and that the only thing that can be done about it is to know that it exists, and to keep knowing that it exists, and to pass this knowledge to the next person, so that the knowledge does not die with the knowers, and so that that thing, which is older than the Fold and older than the Church, and older than any white man who ever set foot in Juab County, does not succeed in erasing the memory of itself even from the mountain.

He writes: “I write to you because you are the kind that keeps records, and I ask you to keep this record and to hand it on. ” “I apologize to you, Mr. Smith, for asking this of you; I know you did not ask to be told this. Nor did I ask to be told.

But what I saw is what told me, and now I pass on to you what I saw. As for myself, I have decided that I will never forget it. And I will not go back there. ”

As for the thirty-nine women, their later lives are as follows.

Vesta Bailey, stone one, who spent eleven years and ten days underground, never spoke again. She lived outside the cell for seven years in her sister’s house in Nephi, where she was fed and cared for and watched, and died in her sleep in April 1909. Elvira Mund, stone two, lived four months outside the cell and died of pneumonia. Loretta Branch, stone three, lived six years outside the cell in her cousin’s house in Payson, and never spoke.

Darnell Oss, stone four, lived twenty-one years outside the cell in the home of her sister Rellma, who was stone sixteen. The two sisters lived together in their father’s house in Mona until his death in 1918, then in a small frame house at the north end of Mona, where they kept chickens and a garden, and were cared for by a hired niece. Neither ever spoke until their deaths. Rellma Oss died in 1923.

Darnell Oss died in 1924. They are buried side by side in Mona Cemetery. Berley Gant, stone five, was one of the four women who regained speech. She lived eleven months outside the cell, and told her mother in Nephi that she had learned to count while in the cell.

She had been counting the breaths of the woman in the next cell, Eiserine Cobb, stone six. And at night, when the thing in the water moved in the walls, Eiserine Cobb’s breathing slowed, and she, Berley, counted that slowing many times. And that slowing was a sign that the thing had reached Eiserine first. And a few seconds later, that thing would reach Berley.

And in those few seconds, Berley learned to pray a prayer that was not the prayer she had been taught, but a prayer she made up for herself. She would quietly repeat the names of the people she loved before the disaster, holding them before her like a little row of candles, so that the thing in the walls, when it came, would have to pass that row of candles to reach her. Berley’s mother wrote this down. Berley Gant died in September 1903.

Birdie Denwood, stone thirty, the stake president’s daughter, who was four years and two months underground at the time of her release, lived forty-six years after, never spoke, never left her mother’s house in Nephi, was cared for by her younger sisters and then their daughters, and died in April 1948. In her mother’s papers, now in the Church History Library in Salt Lake, there is a note in Birdie’s handwriting, written in her first week out, when Birdie’s mother thought she was present for a brief moment before she went into her long silence. The note is three words. The note reads, in a shaky left-handed hand, in pencil: “He went down.

” That three-word note has been interpreted by the small group of researchers who read Breen’s letter and Horner’s notes and the Maud board as referring to Matthias Denwood, Birdie’s father, the Nephi stake president, who had gone up the canyon with four of his high priests in April 1899, and not returned. The three words have been read as meaning that Birdie Denwood, in the cell where she would stay for the next three years and seven months, knew her father had been taken by the men of the Fold, and knew what the men of the Fold did with the brethren who came up the canyon, which was to put them in the south corridor, past the last of the cells, down to the sealed sandstone wall 841 feet in, and leave them there. Mehitabel Forks, stone thirty-three, the wife of Hall Forks who kept the outward letters, lived sixteen months after her release and died in Nephi in February 1904. During those sixteen months she spoke twice.

The first time, three weeks after her release, she said to her younger sister Classey: “I was Mehitabel of the Fold, and I was given over and I did not know I had been given over until after I drank the water. ” “And by then I was already what I am, and now I am out and I do not know who I am. ” The second time, three weeks before her death, she said to Classey in the kitchen of their father’s house in Nephi, where their father, a Danish immigrant stonemason named Leif Mortensen, sat at the window reading the paper, she said: “Father, when they open the south wall, they will not find Hall. ” “They will not find him because Hall is in the water now.

” “Hall has already drunk. ” “Hall went in on the second day. ” “He asked for it. ” “He wanted it.

” “He said he was tired of being the one who did the taking, and he asked the thing to take him instead. ” “And the thing took him, and the twenty-six who stayed above are of no account. They are the ones who could not bear to go in. Hall is the true end of the Fold.

” Her father put the paper down. He asked her what she meant. She did not answer him. She did not speak another word before her death.

Leif Mortensen wrote this down in Danish in his small notebook that same evening in the kitchen. His descendants kept the notebook for ninety-eight years, and in 2002 it was translated into English by his grandson, a Latter-day Saint historian named Jens Mortensen, who then donated the notebook with its translation to the Church History Library in Salt Lake. The passage concerning the Forks Fold and the water is one of the four documents on which the modern understanding of what Forks Fold was about is built. The other three are Breen’s field notebook in the Library of Congress.

The inner register page 141 in the federal file in the Third District in Salt Lake. And the Maud school board in the special collections at Weber State in Ogden. What was in the water? That is the question every one of the nine accredited researchers who read Breen’s letter in the Church History Library has asked.

And every one of the eleven researchers who read Horner’s notes in the Marriott Library has asked it. And Margit Haughard at Weber State asked it. And Alcuin Foss at Brigham Young asked it. And Alison Bailey, Vesta’s great-granddaughter, asked it.

And Jens Mortensen, translator of his great-grandfather’s notebook, asked it. The honest answer is that no one knows. There are four things that are known and can be stated with confidence. The first is that the still water in the round sandstone basin in the central chamber of Forks Fold was there when the Fold was founded in 1861, and was there when the men of the Fold found the chamber in the first years of settlement, which they must have, because the stair above the chamber dates to the 1870s based on the style of the step carving.

Oren Forks and his sons did not build the chamber or the basin or the still water. The chamber and the basin and the still water were there before the Forkses came. The men of the Fold built the stair down to the chamber. They built the corridors east and west off the chamber.

They built the cells. They built the stone chimney building above. They enclosed and extended something they found. They did not make it.

The second known thing is that the still water in the basin, which Alcuin Foss measured in 2005 with a thermometer tied to a string he lowered before he took his photographs, was at the temperature of a fully relaxed human body, 98. 6 degrees Fahrenheit, inside a chamber whose air temperature at the time of measurement was 57 degrees Fahrenheit, which is impossible for a body of still water in an unlit sandstone chamber eleven feet below the surface of a dry creek in central Utah in April, and for which the geologist Foss has no explanation, despite his continued attempts over the following two years to find one, which failed. The third known thing is that in the 1931 entry on the Maud school board, Verlene Maud told her daughter that the thing in the water could reach your mouth without opening it and could pull something from under your tongue. And in her first week out in October 1903, Mehitabel Forks told her sister Classey Mortensen that she, Mehitabel, had been drunk from by the water, and that Hall Forks had asked to be drunk from by the water.

The two accounts, given twenty-eight years apart by two women who did not know each other, who were in different chambers of two different stones, and neither of whom, as far as the evidence shows, had read any account of the Fold, agree on the essential element. There was something drawn from these women. There was something drawn from them again and again. There was something drawn from them over years.

There was something drawn from them in a way that left most of them, once the drawing had continued long enough, unable to speak, unable to turn their heads toward the speaker, unable to focus on faces. Whatever was drawn from them went into the still water in the basin at the center of the middle chamber, and the still water held it. The men of the Fold, by the end of their time, were entering the water themselves of their own will in a sacrament understood only by them. And the twenty-six who remained above ground on the morning of October 21, 1902, were the twenty-six who could not bear to go in.

And those who carried themselves and each other in the hours between Breen’s departure and the marshal’s entry, and went down to the south corridor, and lay on the twenty-six benches in the semicircle before the sealed sandstone wall, and folded their clothes beside them, and did whatever a man does who has decided to be drunk. The fourth known thing is that in September 1858, three years before Oren Forks stood in the Nephi stone meetinghouse and announced his revelation, a Shoshone man named Bajokwa Wyvers, then middle-aged, living with a small band in a side canyon of the Pavant range about seven miles north of the creek that would become Forks Fold, was interviewed by the American Indian agent from Fillmore, a man named Simeon Kane, who was collecting place names and local stories for a planned ethnographic map of the central ranges. The interview was recorded by Agent Kane in his field notebook, now in the National Archives in Washington, D. C.

Bajokwa Wyvers was asked whether there were places in the Pavant range that his people avoided. He said yes, there are four places. The first three places are not relevant here. The fourth, which Bajokwa Wyvers described to Agent Kane through an interpreter named Jedediah Patch, a half-Shoshone trader from Fillmore, was located in a sketch in the notebook about eleven miles up a certain side canyon branching off the main freight road to Levan.

And Bajokwa Wyvers said of it the following, translated by Jedediah Patch and written down by Agent Kane: “There is a mouth in the rock inside that canyon. That mouth has been there since before any of my people came to these mountains. That mouth drinks a kind of water that is not water. The old ones in my grandfather’s time said the mouth was asleep in their day, but it would wake, and when it woke, it would need to be fed.

And that whoever found it first after it woke would feed it, because the mouth, when it wakes, is persuasive. And those who find it will not be able to resist themselves. The old ones said: ‘When the mouth wakes, we will know it because the smoke of its breathing will come out through the rock. My people do not go to that canyon.

We do not go to that canyon even to hunt. We do not go to that canyon even in winter when game is scarce. We will not go to that canyon. ‘” Agent Kane deposited the field notebook in 1859.

The notebook was never used to make a map. The notebook remained in Record Group 75 for ninety-three years. In 1952, a Columbia graduate student named Hershel Oates, writing a dissertation on nineteenth-century ethnographers of the Great Basin, found the notebook and read it, and included the Bajokwa Wyvers excerpt as an appendix to his dissertation. In her copy of Oates’s dissertation, in her office at Weber State, Margit Haughard wrote three words in pencil in the margin beside the passage.

The three words are: “The Fold woke. ” “The Fold woke. ”

If Haughard’s reading of the Bajokwa Wyvers passage is correct, and if the small group of researchers who read the four documents are right in their tentative, unconfirmed, private consensus, then the sequence of events that led from the stone meetinghouse in Nephi in 1861 to the twenty-six folded white gowns in the south corridor in October 1902 was as follows. The mouth in the rock inside the Pavant canyon had been there long before any human came to those mountains, and it was asleep.

In the 1850s, in a way no one knows, the mouth began to wake. In 1858, the Shoshone of the Pavant knew the mouth was waking and kept away from the canyon. In 1861, Oren Forks, in a stone meetinghouse in Nephi, received what he believed was a revelation that the Lord was moving the center of His work into a hollow in the mountains to the east. Oren Forks and the men who followed him walked up the canyon.

By the mid-1860s they had found the chamber under the dry creek, and the basin and the water, and the water had made itself known to them in a way that cannot be described within the categories of our science. And the Forkses, in a rite they themselves called the covenant of the Fold, agreed to feed it. The water, by its slow drawing of them, pushed them to feed it with increasing frequency and increasing cruelty until they moved from feeding it their travelers, to feeding it their daughters, to feeding it their sisters, to feeding it their wives, until they finally came to feeding it themselves, man after man, in October 1902, when the arrival of a federal surveyor at the mouth of the canyon was understood by the headman Hall Forks as a sign that the work of the Fold was finished, and that the women must be left for the police to find, and the men must enter the water themselves. It is not known whether the mouth went back to sleep in the autumn of 1902, or whether it is still awake under the dry creek, under the ruins of the stone building, under the dust of the forty-one steps, in the sandstone basin in the central chamber.

In 2005, Alcuin Foss, lowering his string with the thermometer, found the water at the temperature of a resting body. The water was not cold. The water was carrying someone’s heat in it. Foss did not stay long.

He took his three photographs, came back up the stairs, and wrote in his field notebook this sentence: “I did not take the south corridor, and I will not come back here, and I will not tell my students about this place. ” The federal file is no longer secret. Any citizen of the United States may apply to the Third District in Salt Lake and read it. Breen’s letter is no longer secret.

Any accredited researcher may apply to the Church History Library and read it. Horner’s notes can be read at the Marriott Library. The thirty-nine women lie in the ground in the Catholic section of Provo City Cemetery, and in the small cemeteries of Nephi, Payson, Mona, Levan, Fillmore, and Ogden. The men of the Fold are not in the ground as far as anyone knows, except perhaps in the water in the basin, or in the dust of the south corridor beyond the sealed sandstone wall 841 feet in, or in the stone of the wall itself.

The surface settlement is ruins overgrown with cheatgrass and greasewood, with a roofless stone building open to the sky, and a dark chimney opening in its center, with no smoke column rising from it as far as anyone knows since the morning of October 20, 1902, as far as anyone knows. There is an unconfirmed report from a cattleman working the lower slopes of the Pavant range in the autumn of 1998, that from the hill above the canyon about three miles out, late on the afternoon of October 20 of that year, which fell on the ninety-sixth anniversary of the day Breen came out of the canyon with the register page in his coat, he saw for perhaps a minute a slow-turning column that he first took for wood smoke rising from the bottom of the cleft. The column had not been there in the morning. The column was gone the next morning.

The cattleman did not go down into the canyon. The cattleman, whose name appeared in a letter to the editor of a small county weekly, added only one sentence after describing the column. The sentence read in full: “I will not go into that canyon. ” “I will not go into that canyon in winter to hunt.

I will not go into that canyon even in winter when game is bad. I will not go into that canyon. ” Those are the four sentences spoken by Bajokwa Wyvers in September 1858, forty-four years before the posse went up the dry creek with lanterns, and 126 years before the cattleman stood on the hill above the pass, and 168 years before this story reached you. One hundred and sixty-eight years, and the men are repeating them.

One hundred and sixty-eight years, and the men are avoiding that pass.