In the winter of 1866, a traveling Methodist preacher named Elias Bone entered a narrow canyon northwest of Pueblo, Colorado, looking for a widow who had sent word asking for prayers over her stillborn child. He never came out. Two weeks later, his horse wandered into a settlement along Hardscrabble Creek, starving, with a leather saddlebag still tied to its flanks. Inside the bag was a Bible, a brass pocket watch, and a bookmark of tanned, stitched human skin.

Twelve names were written on it in a fine, careful hand that might have belonged to a schoolteacher. The itinerant preacher’s name was the thirteenth, scratched in with a fingernail, as though whoever added it had run out of ink and used the only tool at hand. The sheriff in Pueblo took one look at that bookmark and did something no one expected. He put it back in the bag, ordered his deputy to burn the whole thing in the stove, and said the preacher must have fallen from a cliff.

He said it loudly enough for everyone in the general store to hear. When the dead man’s brother came from Kansas three months later with questions, the sheriff said he remembered no such Bible, no such watch, no such bookmark. He said the canyons swallow men all the time, and it might be best to go home and pray. That sheriff died six years later of what a doctor called a weakness of the heart.

His widow told their daughter, decades afterward, that he had not slept more than two hours a night since the winter of ’66. She said he kept a loaded revolver under his pillow and another in the chamber pot. She said that when he was dying, he gripped her wrist and whispered a word over and over that she could not understand. The word was Yates.

The Yates family was not outlaw in the way cheap novels liked to picture. They did not rob stagecoaches. They did not shoot sheriffs in the street at noon. They did not ride into town with kerchiefs over their faces.

The Yateses lived in a canyon system so remote that the United States Army did not fully map it until 1898. They lived there for nearly four decades. In those four decades, by the most conservative estimate the state of Colorado ever acknowledged in writing, they killed between 74 and 240 people. Children.

Travelers. Mormons on their way to Utah. Chinese railroad workers who lost their way at the pass. An entire wedding party in 1871.

Two federal surveyors in 1879. A troupe of five actors who were supposed to perform at the opera house in Leadville and never arrived. A pregnant woman and her midwife in 1884. What was done to the bodies when they were found is the reason the official records were sealed by order of the Colorado state legislature in 1911, and they remain sealed to this day under a doctrine called preventive detention, invented specifically for this case and applied to no other.

This is the story of a family that lived off the dead the way most families live off a farm. It is the story of a mother who taught her children a prayer she had composed herself, a prayer recited only before a murder. It is the story of a valley whose three-mile length is still closed today by the Bureau of Land Management for reasons the Bureau refuses to put in writing. And it is the story of why, in the autumn of 1904, a column of 211 men from four counties entered that canyon carrying rifles and lanterns, and only 162 came out.

They brought with them no member of the Yates family, alive or dead. No one ever found a grave for the Yateses. To understand how the Yates clan became what it became, you have to go back before 1866. Back to a hollow in eastern Kentucky in 1817, to a one-room cabin where a woman named Prudence Yates gave birth to twins and buried her husband in the same week.

The husband was a trapper. He came home one evening with a knife wound in his side that no one had inflicted. The story Prudence told the midwife, and the midwife told the preacher, was that he had stumbled while carrying a skinned deer and fallen on his own blade. No one who knew Prudence Yates believed that story.

But no one dared say so aloud, because Prudence Yates had a particular way of looking at a person. Even her own mother, on her deathbed, told the parish priest that the child she had borne in 1796 was not a child she recognized. She said the eyes were strange. When she held the baby, the baby did not cry.

When she laid it on the puncheon floor, it stared at the ceiling and smiled at something only it could see. The priest recorded that in his private journal, which a historian at the University of Kentucky found in 1962 and published in a small, obscure study of which only 48 copies were ever made. All forty-eight were purchased within six months by a lawyer from Denver who paid cash and used a false name. Prudence Yates raised her twin sons alone in that Kentucky hollow until the summer of 1831, when the elder boy, named Absalom, turned fourteen.

In July of that year, a traveling peddler and his nine-year-old daughter stopped at the Yates cabin to ask for water. Nothing more was ever heard of the peddler. The daughter was found eleven days later wandering on a hill four miles south of the cabin, naked, mute, clutching a human finger bone in her left hand. She never spoke another word for the rest of her life.

She lived until 1897 in an asylum in Lexington. The nurse who washed her body for burial reported marks on her back, old and healed, forming letters. The letters spelled one word: mother. When the authorities in Pike County reached the Yates place, Prudence and her boys were gone.

The cabin was so completely emptied that even the floorboards had been pried up and taken. In a pit beneath what had been the root cellar, the deputies found seven human skulls arranged in a circle around a flat stone. On the stone was a design carved with a knife that none of the deputies recognized. The sheriff who led the search burned the cabin to the ground that same afternoon and refused to discuss what he had seen.

In his report, filed six weeks later, he described the site as, quote, a hog-butchering area apparently used by an unknown squatter family. End quote. He did not mention the skulls. He did not mention the stone.

He did not mention that one of his own deputies, a young man named Robert Tegg, hanged himself in a hay barn three days after the search, leaving a note that said only: I cannot close my eyes without seeing it. Forgive me. Prudence Yates and her sons vanished from the official record for nearly eleven years. A seventeen-year-old boy named Absalom Reed was arrested in 1836 in the Indian Territory for killing a Choctaw trader, and escaped custody before trial after killing the deputy assigned to guard him.

The deputy was found with his throat cut. Every one of his teeth was missing. The teeth were never found. But in the spring of 1842, three newcomers joined a wagon train heading west on the Santa Fe Trail at a trading post near Bent’s Fort, in what later became Colorado.

The three were a woman of about forty-five who gave her name as Prudence Yates, and two grown sons named Absalom and Ezra. They said they were bound for California to join family. They had their own wagon, their own oxen, their own provisions. The wagon master wrote in his journal that night that the woman had the finest set of teeth he had ever seen in a person of her age, and that the sons spoke only to each other, in a language he could not identify.

He wrote that the oxen panicked around the Yates wagon in a way he had never seen oxen panic, and that the train’s seven dogs never approached the Yates wagon at all. By the time the train reached the Arkansas River crossing, four of those seven dogs were dead, found at the edge of camp with their skulls crushed and their brains missing. The wagon master accused no one. Still, he suggested at the next council meeting that the Yates wagon go on ahead at its own pace, with the rest of the train catching up later.

Prudence Yates smiled at the suggestion and agreed. The next morning the Yates wagon was gone before dawn. It had not headed west. It had turned north, toward the foothills of what are now the Wet Mountains, into a region no one lived in at that time because of the rough terrain and poor water, and because the Ute bands who hunted there did not welcome visitors.

The Yates wagon was never seen on any road again. The oxen were never found. But over the next twenty-four years, hunters and prospectors who ventured into that country came back, if they came back at all, with stories. Stories of a cabin at the head of a narrow canyon where smoke rose from the chimney at odd hours.

Stories of a woman who could be seen from a distance washing something red in a stream, and who vanished by the time a hunter drew close, leaving the water clean. Stories of a boy, then two boys, then three, then five, then eight, sometimes glimpsed on the rim above the canyon, watching. Just watching. Never approaching.

Never fleeing. Standing there in perfect stillness for as long as the hunter could bear to look back, which was never very long. A Ute hunter told a priest in 1858 that his people had a name for that canyon. The name translated roughly to the place where the mother eats.

He said his grandfather had taken him there once as a boy and shown him the mouth from a high ridge, and told him that none of his people would ever enter that canyon, because what lived in it was older than the Ute and would remain there even after the tribe was gone. The grandfather told him only that when the wind blew out of the canyon in the right direction, you could smell what was inside. The smell, he said, was the smell of a kitchen cooking the same thing for a thousand years. And the thing it was cooking was not an animal.

By 1866, the family Prudence Yates had built in that canyon had grown. Absalom Yates, the elder twin, was now forty-nine. He had taken a wife of sorts, a woman no one in the outside world had ever seen, whose existence was inferred from bones. Ezra Yates, the younger twin, had done the same.

Between them and their mother, then sixty-nine and showing no sign of decline, the Yates clan had produced between eleven and sixteen children of the next generation, and those children were in turn producing children of their own. There was no outside blood in the family. There had never been any outside blood, except for the transitory, strategic use of travelers who were taken into the canyon alive and did not come out the way they went in. This is the first thing to understand about the Yates clan, because it is the thing that sets them apart from any other frontier horror story.

The Yateses did not kill travelers because they were savages, or because they were starving, or because they had lost their minds. They killed travelers out of doctrine. Prudence Yates, somewhere between Kentucky and Colorado, developed a system of belief. And she wrote it down.

We know she wrote it down because fragments of her writings were recovered from the canyon in 1904 by men who could not read what they had picked up but brought it out anyway, wrapped in waxed cloth, because they had been ordered to bring out any paper they found. Those fragments, translated by a Yale scholar in 1912, described a universe in which the human soul was not something one possessed but something one acquired slowly over a lifetime by consuming the souls of others. Prudence Yates believed that at her death she would be weighed by the mass of soul she had gathered, and that those with the greatest accumulated weight would ascend to a specific place she described in her own hand as the room above the sky. Those of lighter weight would be erased entirely, as if they had never existed.

There was no middle ground. There was no mercy. There was only acquisition. She taught this to her sons.

She taught it to her sons’ wives. She taught it to her grandchildren. By the time the itinerant preacher Elias Bone entered that canyon in 1866, there were between fourteen and nineteen members of the Yates family actively practicing acquisition, and they had been practicing it, by their own accounting, for more than fifty years. The itinerant preacher was not the first.

He was simply the first whose personal effects happened to come out, tied to a horse that had slipped its tether. What happened to Elias Bone after he entered the canyon can be reconstructed partly from Prudence Yates’s writings, translated in part by the Yale scholar before he suffered what the university later described as a nervous collapse. The scholar’s name was Henrik Vollmer. He was thirty-four when he began the translation.

He was forty-one when he was committed to a private asylum in Vermont, where he spent the remaining nineteen years of his life, never speaking another word in any language, by all accounts. His translation notes were kept in a locked drawer at Yale until 1987, when they were bequeathed to the Smithsonian, which has allowed no researcher to examine them in the past four decades. But Vollmer, before his breakdown, published a short paper in a journal of comparative religion in 1915. In that paper he described what he called the Yates ritual.

The ritual was a sequence of acts performed on a captive traveler, which Prudence Yates believed would transfer the traveler’s soul, intact and conscious, into the body of whichever Yates family member was most in need of acquisition at that particular moment. The sequence, according to Vollmer, took between eleven and fourteen days. It did not kill the traveler on the first day. It did not kill the traveler on the second day.

The traveler was kept alive throughout the ritual by means Vollmer declined to describe in the published text. The traveler was kept conscious. Often, on the final day, the traveler was able to participate in the ritual himself by uttering certain phrases the family believed were necessary to complete the transfer. Elias Bone remained in the canyon for nineteen days before the final phase was carried out on him.

We know this because Prudence Yates kept a register, a leather-bound book found in 1904, which, according to the testimony of one of the men who recovered it, now sits in a bank vault in Chicago under a false name, administered by a foundation created by the state of Colorado in 1911 for the sole purpose of ensuring the book is never opened again. The man who wrote the deathbed letter was Nathaniel Crofts. He was one of the 211 men who went up into the canyon in the autumn of 1904. He was one of the 162 who came back.

He died in 1949 at the age of ninety-one. His letter was addressed to his grandson, with instructions to open it on the grandson’s fiftieth birthday. The grandson opened it in 1988. Peter Crofts was a dentist in Grand Junction.

He read the letter, put it back in its envelope, drove that evening to a bluff overlooking the Colorado River, stopped the car, walked twenty feet, and shot himself in the mouth with a pistol he had bought that morning. The letter was found in the glove box. It is seventeen pages long. It has never been published in full.

Portions have appeared in two books, both of which went out of print within a year of publication. A copy of each sold at auction in London in 2004 for a combined £81,000 to a buyer who gave the name of a Swiss company that does not appear to exist. But the available portions, assembled alongside Vollmer’s 1915 paper and the handful of surviving testimonies from the 1904 expedition, give us this much. Upon capture, the traveler was first stripped of all possessions, which were entered into Prudence’s register with the date and a brief description.

Then the traveler was washed in a particular stream at the back of the canyon by whichever two clan members were believed to be the youngest adults at the time. The washing was not for cleanliness. It was for what Prudence called opening. The washing involved certain herbs, which grew only in that canyon and nowhere else ever botanically classified, which, when steeped in water, placed the traveler in a state of extreme suggestibility.

In this state the traveler was asked a series of questions. The questions concerned the traveler’s life: where he was born, who his parents were, what he loved, what he feared, what he had done that he had never told anyone. The answers were written in Prudence’s register beside the traveler’s name. On the third day, the traveler was asked to name a person, living or dead, whom he loved more than anything in the world.

The name was recorded. On the fourth day, the clan performed before the traveler a reenactment of that named person’s death. The reenactment used a wax effigy made by Prudence’s own hands, dressed in clothes that matched the description nearly exactly. The traveler was forced to watch.

If the named person was still living, the clan later, by means unclear in the surviving records but which appear to have involved messengers of some kind, ensured that the person indeed died shortly after the reenactment. In at least four cases Vollmer was able to document that the named person did die, of causes considered natural at the time, within weeks of the reenactment, hundreds of miles away. Vollmer did not attempt to explain this in his notes. He simply recorded it.

By the sixth day, the traveler was no longer himself in any meaningful sense. The herbs continued, the questions continued, the reenactments continued. By the ninth day, according to Prudence’s register, the traveler began to speak in the voice of the person he had named on the third day. He said things only that person could have known.

He responded to names only that person had been called. The register’s entries for these days are terse, almost clinical. Day nine. Subject spoke in the voice of the sister.

The sister asked forgiveness for burning the barn in 1859. Subject knows nothing of any barn. The sister is not alive for anyone to ask. On the eleventh day, the traveler was asked a final question.

The question was: do you consent? If the traveler said yes, the ritual proceeded to its final phase. If he said no, the ritual was aborted and the traveler was killed by means Vollmer refused to describe, and his soul, by Prudence’s belief system, was not acquired but simply released, which was considered a terrible waste. The register records that of 194 travelers who reached the eleventh day, 186 said yes.

It does not record what happened to the eight who said no, except for a small note in Prudence’s hand beside each of their names, translating roughly to they returned to the air. Elias Bone, the itinerant preacher, said yes on the eleventh day. His records indicate he said yes while crying, and that he then asked whether his mother in Ohio would know what had become of him, and that Prudence Yates told him his mother would know, and that she would be proud of him. The register does not record whether this was true.

It does not record what Elias Bone’s mother thought when, two years later, she received through the anonymous mail a lock of her son’s hair braided into a small ring with a note reading: he is with me now. The note was in Prudence Yates’s handwriting. The mother turned the lock and the note over to the sheriff in her Ohio town. The sheriff forwarded them to the sheriff in Pueblo.

The sheriff in Pueblo put the note and the lock in a drawer and answered no further letters on the subject. The final phase, on the fourteenth day, was the one Vollmer could not describe in his published paper. His private notes, according to a Yale librarian who read them before they were sealed, consisted of a single page on which Vollmer had written: I have translated the words. I will not set them down.

If a reader of these notes wishes to know what was done on the fourteenth day, let him know only this. It was not quick. It was not kind. And the Yates family believed with all their hearts that it worked.

Whether it worked or not is not for us to decide. What we can say is this. Between 1842 and 1904, between 74 and 240 people vanished in a specific patch of southern Colorado countryside. The Yates clan, by its own records, claimed responsibility for 194 of them.

And the register covers only full rituals. It does not include travelers killed outright without ritual for reasons not entirely clear, but which appear to have concerned the traveler being deemed unsuitable for acquisition. Children under about five, for example, were considered unsuitable, because in Prudence’s belief a small child’s soul was not dense enough to be worth taking. These children were killed in a different, swifter manner, which Prudence described in her register as mercy.

The register records 28 cases of mercy between 1842 and 1904. One of them, in 1884, was for a newborn infant whose mother was undergoing the ritual at the time. The entry notes that the mother, on the ninth day, in the voice of her own grandmother, asked to see the child, was brought it, held it through the afternoon, that mercy was carried out at dusk, and that the mother thanked them. The Yates clan believed, by Prudence’s teaching, that they were not monsters.

They believed they were priests. They believed they were the only priests of a true and ancient religion, and that the rest of the world, having forgotten that religion, deserved to be used as fuel. They taught this to their children. The children knew no other world.

They were born in the canyon. They grew up in the canyon. The eldest child of the third generation, a woman named Mercy Yates, born in 1854, had never seen a town, never seen a train, never seen a person not related to her by blood, never heard a voice other than her mother’s, father’s, uncles’, aunts’, siblings’, cousins’, grandmother’s, and the voices of the travelers who came and went. She was fifty years old when 211 men went up into the canyon in 1904.

She was, by the account of the men who saw her, the last Yates to die that night, dying on a flat rock at the back of the canyon by her own hand, with a knife she had used, by her own count, on 61 travelers over the course of her life. Her last words, according to Nathaniel Crofts’s deathbed letter, were spoken in a voice that was not her own. She said, in the voice of a man whose accent suggested he had been dead perhaps thirty years, possibly Welsh: Mother, the fire is going out. Mother, please.

Then she drove the knife into the hollow of her throat and fell forward onto the stone, and did not move again. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We have not yet reached 1904. We have not yet reached how the outside world finally came to understand what lived in that canyon.

To get there, we must cross the long years between the return of the itinerant preacher’s horse to Hardscrabble Creek in 1866 and the raid of 1904. Thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years in which the Yates clan grew from fourteen members to forty-three in the final count. Thirty-eight years in which travelers kept vanishing.

Thirty-eight years in which rumors spread through the saloons, churches, and newspaper offices of southern Colorado, and were systematically suppressed every time. Suppressed by sheriffs. Suppressed by newspaper owners. Suppressed by the office of the territorial governor.

Suppressed, in one strange and still unexplained incident in 1879, by a federal agent from Washington who arrived in Pueblo with sealed orders, left three days later, and was never heard of again in that part of the country. Why was it suppressed? That is a question with no clear answer. The answer historians have given to the few who dared approach the subject is that the territorial authorities simply lacked the resources; that the canyon was too remote; that any force sent in would be slaughtered to the last man; that the political cost of a massacre was higher than the political cost of pretending nothing had happened.

This is a reasonable answer. But it is also incomplete, because the suppression continued long after Colorado became a state in 1876. It continued long after the railroads reached Pueblo, Trinidad, and Leadville. It continued long after the U.

S. Cavalry had the capacity, by any measure, to send 400 men into that canyon in a single operation. It continued in some respects into the twentieth century, and it can be argued it continues today in the sealed records of the state legislature, the closed papers at the Smithsonian, and the sealed depository vault in Chicago. The incomplete answer that some researchers have pointed to, and which the state of Colorado has never officially addressed, is that at least four territorial governors, two U.

S. senators, and one Colorado Supreme Court justice were connected by blood to the Yates clan. Not a close kinship. Never acknowledged.

But a connection nonetheless. The family genealogy, compiled by an amateur researcher in the 1970s whose book was pulled from the presses by his publisher after legal threats from a party the researcher refused to identify, traces the line back through Prudence Yates’s sister, who did not go west, who remained in Kentucky, who married respectably, and whose descendants scattered across the country into positions of modest but growing influence. The researcher’s name was Harland Beas. He died in 1981 of what the coroner called a heart attack in his sleep.

He was fifty-three and had no history of heart trouble. His home was cleared of his manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and personal library within 48 hours by a cleaning company his family had not hired, which was never traced as a real company. What we know from Beas’s book, of which perhaps 80 copies exist in private collections, is this. The Yates connection, running east through the Kentucky sister, produced a thin but steady line of descendants who, by the 1870s, held minor positions in state and territorial governments across the American West.

These descendants, as far as Beas could establish, knew nothing about their relatives in the canyon. They did not need to. All they had to do, when a Yates matter reached their offices in any form, was make it disappear. They did this not because they were complicit with Prudence Yates.

They did it because they had been raised in their homes on a particular family story. The family story was: there is an old shame on us. There is an old shame on us out of Kentucky. If anyone ever raises a certain name to you in a certain context, in a certain part of the country, make it disappear.

Do not ask why. Do not investigate. Make it disappear. Beas could not prove the origin of this family instruction.

He suspected it came from Prudence Yates’s own mother, who had told the priest about the child with the strange eyes. He suspected the instruction had been given to the sister in Kentucky in 1817 or 1818, with a warning that if it were ever violated, something would come east to collect. He could not prove it. He could only prove the pattern.

A pattern of suppression among Yates descendants on the eastern side of the family across six decades and four states, matching almost perfectly the periods when the Yates clan on the western side was most active. Whether the Kentucky sister knew what her relatives were doing in Colorado, we will likely never know. Whether she suspected, we can guess. The letter she wrote to a cousin in Virginia, which Beas found in a university archive, refers to Prudence as follows: my sister who went west with the boys, for whom I pray every night, and of whom I will not speak in this house.

End quote. The cousin replied in a letter dated 1849: I understand. I will not ask. May the Lord have mercy on her and on us all.

The Lord, if he was listening, did not appear to extend his mercy to any of those concerned. By 1879, the Yateses had killed enough people in a short enough period that two federal surveyors sent to plot a railroad route through the Wet Mountains failed to return on schedule. These surveyors had considerable connections. One was a nephew of a congressman from Pennsylvania.

The congressman applied pressure. The pressure reached the territorial governor in Denver. The governor, Frederick Pitkin, a man of integrity by all accounts, sent a company of 32 men under a captain named Reed into the general area where the surveyors had last been seen. The company consisted of experienced frontiersmen and former cavalrymen.

They were armed with Winchester rifles and provisioned for three weeks. Captain Reed and 19 of his 32 men came back out of the mountains after eleven days. They had not found the surveyors. They had not found any Yates family member.

They had not found anything they were willing to put on paper. Reed wrote a report of exactly 81 words, delivered it to the governor’s office, resigned his commission the next day, and moved his family to Oregon. The thirteen men who did not return were listed as dead from exposure, although the weather in the Wet Mountains in September 1879 was fine and the men were well equipped. One of the thirteen was Reed’s younger brother.

In a private letter to his mother that survived in a family collection and was quoted in Beas’s book, Reed wrote this. Mother, I have seen something I will not describe. I left my brother in that country, because bringing him out would have required going back for him, and I will not go back. I will carry this with me to my grave.

I will carry his face in my dreams. Forgive me. What Reed saw can be reconstructed in part from the account of one of the nineteen men who came back with him, a scout named Jesús Marín, who got drunk one night in a Trinidad saloon and told a Mexican newspaperman what he had seen. The newspaperman wrote it for a Spanish-language weekly in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

The weekly printed the article. The weekly’s offices burned down two nights later. The newspaperman left town. No copies of that issue survive, but Beas, in his research, tracked down the newspaperman in Mexico City in 1976, an old man by then, who remembered what Marín had told him.

Marín said, as relayed by the newspaperman, that Reed’s company had tracked the surveyors to the mouth of a narrow canyon in a part of the Wet Mountains none of the men knew. They made camp at the mouth on the evening of the ninth day. They posted sentries. The sentries reported all night hearing a sound like singing coming from deep in the canyon, carried on the wind, a woman’s voice in a language none of them could identify.

The singing continued without interruption for hours. Just before dawn, the singing stopped. In the silence that followed, three sentries at the far end of the canyon mouth, where it opened onto a meadow, saw a procession. A procession of figures carrying something between them, moving slowly across the meadow and into the canyon.

The figures numbered, by the sentries’ count, nine. The thing they carried was wrapped in white cloth. One sentry, who owned a brass telescope, reported that the thing inside the cloth was moving. Captain Reed, informed of this at dawn, ordered the company into the canyon.

They did not get far. According to Marín’s account, they had covered about three-quarters of a mile inside the canyon when the first of the thirteen men who would not return, a soldier named Hollis, stepped on something buried beneath a thin layer of dirt and leaves. It was a trap. The trap was ingenious.

It was made of sharpened wooden stakes driven into the canyon walls on both sides, triggered by a tripwire. When Hollis’s foot caught the wire, the stakes swung down from both walls simultaneously, impaling him through the chest and thigh and shoulder. He died almost immediately, Marín said. The problem was the stakes.

They were coated with something that smelled sweet, and the smell of the stakes mixing with the smell of Hollis’s blood filled the canyon within minutes, and the horses began to panic. While the men struggled with the horses, something came down the canyon walls. Marín said he could not see it clearly. He said it moved on four limbs, or perhaps crawled like a man, but with a speed beyond any human movement.

He said there was more than one of them. He said he saw a soldier near him, a young man named Collins, lifted off the ground and carried up the canyon wall by something that gripped Collins by the back of the neck, with Collins screaming for his mother all the way up. Collins cleared the rim. The screaming stopped.

A moment later, Collins came back down headfirst, but he was already dead, and most of his body was no longer attached when it hit the ground. It was then that Captain Reed ordered the retreat. The retreat was a run out of the canyon through panicking horses while men were picked off from above by whatever waited on the walls. Marín said that at one point, in the last two hundred yards before the canyon mouth, he looked up and saw a woman standing on the rim, perfectly still, watching them.

She was old, he said. Perhaps in her seventies. Her hair was long and white and loose, and she was smiling. He said he never forgot her face.

He said he dreamed of that face every night for the rest of his life. That was Prudence Yates. By then, by ordinary calculation, she would have been 107 years old. The register, recovered 25 years later, confirms she was still alive in 1879, writing in her own hand, presiding over the rituals.

Her last entry, in 1898, is written in a hand that is clearly weaker, but still recognizable as hers. She would have been 126. The entry concerns a female traveler whose name was not known, a woman of about thirty, taken alone in the timber above one of the trails. The entry notes the woman reached the eleventh day and said yes.

The entry is signed, as all her entries were, with a single letter P, written in a distinctive looping style unmistakable across eighty years of the register’s existence. Prudence Yates’s death is not recorded in the register. After 1898, the register is written in another hand. That hand belongs to Mercy Yates, Prudence’s granddaughter.

Mercy’s entries are more practical, less poetic, than Prudence’s. Mercy’s last entry, dated September 22, 1904, concerns a young man who wandered into the canyon that day alone, apparently a prospector. The entry describes the initial stages of his washing. The entry breaks off mid-sentence.

The last legible word Mercy wrote is lights. Lights, followed by a comma, as though she had been about to describe what those lights were doing. She never finished the sentence. By the next morning, the 211 men were in the canyon, and Mercy Yates had less than 17 hours to live.

How did the 211 men get there? The story the state of Colorado told in the brief, edited press release of October 1904 was that a lone prospector found what he called evidence of a large criminal operation in a remote canyon in the Wet Mountains, and that the Pueblo County sheriff, acting on his report, organized a volunteer posse to investigate. The release stated that the posse fought a long armed battle with criminals who refused to surrender, during which 49 of the posse were killed, and all of the criminals were killed as well. The release did not name the criminals.

The release did not describe the nature of the criminal operation. The release claimed the number of criminals was about 20, which was untrue. The actual number was 43. The true story of how the raid happened is this.

In the summer of 1904, a cattle inspector from Walsenburg named Owen Fletcher was investigating a long pattern of cattle disappearances in the Wet Mountain region. Fletcher was a methodical man. He kept notebooks. He tracked patterns.

He began to notice that the cattle disappearances, plotted on a map, formed a rough ring around a portion of canyon country that had never been settled, never grazed, never surveyed in detail. He also began to notice that the human disappearances in that region over the past four decades formed a similar ring. He asked questions. He received a polite request from his superiors to drop the matter.

He did not drop it. In August 1904, Owen Fletcher took two weeks’ leave from his job and rode alone into the canyon country with a notebook, a camera, and a rifle. Owen Fletcher came out of there. He came out on foot after nineteen days, having lost his rifle, his camera, and his boots, and his hair had turned completely white.

He walked into the general store in a settlement called Rosita at about four in the afternoon on September 13, 1904, and asked the storekeeper for a glass of water. He drank the water. He sat down on a barrel. He said to the storekeeper: send for every man you can summon.

Every man with a rifle. Send for the sheriff. Send for the state. I will tell you what I saw.

Then he began to cry, and he did not stop crying for several hours. Owen Fletcher’s testimony, given over three days to a group of men that included the sheriffs of Pueblo, Oray, Saguache, Fremont, and Custer counties, a captain of the state militia, and a young reporter from the Rocky Mountain News who was later paid money never to write what he heard, is the single most important document in the history of this case. The testimony was taken down by hand by a court clerk. It ran to over 400 pages.

The moment it was complete it was placed in a locked iron cabinet in the office of the governor of Colorado, where it remained until 1911, when it was sent to the state legislature and placed under the doctrine of preventive detention, where it remains to this day. No one outside a very small circle has ever read it in full. But Nathaniel Crofts, in his 1949 letter to his grandson, described what Fletcher told the sheriffs as the sheriffs organized the men bound for the canyon. Fletcher said he had been captured by the clan on the second night of his expedition, held in a wooden cage at the back of a cave at the head of a narrow canyon, subjected to what we now know as the first six days of the ritual, and on the seventh day, during a lapse in his captors’ attention, broke the latch of his cage with the heel of his boot, crawled through a side passage, and made his way out of the canyon in darkness and terror, up to the hills and down for twelve days until he reached Rosita.

Fletcher had seen many things at the back of that cave. He saw the register, open on a wooden table, being written in by an old woman who told him her name was Prudence. He saw a wall of shelves on which rested, by his count, between 60 and 80 human skulls, each with a name carved into the forehead. He saw a chamber deep in the cave whose floor was packed earth, dark and damp.

He saw in that chamber something he refused to describe to the sheriffs. He saw, chained in a corner, a woman of about twenty who had been the clan’s prisoner for nearly four years. Fletcher said the woman asked him to kill her before he escaped. He had not been able to do it.

He promised her, before he crawled out, that he would come back for her. He told the sheriff that this promise was the only thing that kept him alive in the badlands for those twelve days. If the sheriff did not mount the raid, he would go back alone and die trying, and their deaths would be on the sheriff’s head. The sheriff organized the raid.

It took three weeks to assemble the men. The men came from four counties. Many were volunteers who had lost family members to the disappearances in the canyon over the previous decades. One, a man named Thomas Barrow, had lost his sister in 1871.

One, a man named Elias Winters, had lost his father in 1858, a trapper who never came home. One, Nathaniel Crofts himself, had lost no one personally but had grown up on the stories of the canyon and had wanted since boyhood to be part of anything that ended it. The 211 men left Rosita at 4:00 a. m.

on September 22, 1904. They traveled all day. They reached the mouth of Slot Canyon at about 2:00 a. m.

on the 23rd. Fletcher led them, refusing to be left behind. They were armed with Winchester rifles, Colt revolvers, lanterns, torches, and 24 sticks of dynamite obtained from the Westcliffe mines. What happened over the next eleven hours in that canyon, in the dark and in the dawn that followed, is known partly from Nathaniel Crofts’s letter, partly from a few other private letters and statements that have surfaced over the decades, and partly unknown and likely to remain unknown forever.

What we can say with certainty is this. Of the 211 men who entered the canyon, 162 came out. Of the 43 members of the Yates family who were in the canyon that night, none came out. The last Yates, Mercy, died on the flat stone at the back of the canyon by her own hand at about 1:00 in the afternoon of September 23.

The chained woman Fletcher had promised to return for was found alive. She was carried out of the canyon on a stretcher. Her name, which she was finally able to tell the sheriff after weeks of care, was Hannah Doyle. The Yateses had taken her in 1900 from a wagon train west of Pueblo when she was sixteen.

She was twenty when she was rescued. She lived in a Catholic convent in Denver until 1962, when she died at seventy-eight. She never married. She never spoke of what happened to her in the canyon.

The nuns who cared for her reported that she prayed in a language that was not English for several hours each day, and that she sometimes screamed in the night, and that her screaming was, in the opinion of the mother superior, the sound of a soul that had been borrowed and not fully returned. The forty-nine men who did not come out died in various ways. Twelve were killed by traps similar to the one that killed Hollis in 1879. Nine were killed by Yates children, some as young as seven, who fought with knives and teeth and a ferocity the surviving men found hard to describe.

Six were killed by Mercy Yates personally in the last stand at the flat stone before she stabbed herself. Four were killed by Absalom Yates the younger, grandson of the original Absalom, nineteen years old, who fought with a calm more disturbing than any ferocity. He stood on a ledge and shot men below with a rifle taken from one of the first soldiers he killed. When his ammunition ran out, he stepped off the ledge and fell forty feet to his death, quietly, as though he had decided it was time.

The remaining eighteen died of causes Crofts said he would not describe because he did not want his grandson to imagine them. But there was one thing Crofts did describe, which haunted everyone who read the published fragments of his letter, and which may be the single reason the state of Colorado has kept this case buried for so long. Crofts wrote that in the last hour of the raid, after Mercy Yates had killed herself and after every remaining Yates had apparently been accounted for, the men swept the back caves. In the deepest cave, behind a false stone wall made to look natural, they found a chamber.

The chamber was about thirty feet in diameter, perfectly round, its walls lined with human bones set into the stone with a kind of mortar. The bones formed patterns. The patterns, Crofts wrote, were not random. The patterns, read in a certain order starting at the entrance and moving clockwise, formed words.

The words were in English. The words were a long list of names. The names were those of every traveler the clan had abducted from 1842 to 1904, including names of travelers who had never been reported missing, taken from remote areas where no one had noticed their absence. There were, by Crofts’s rough count, between 300 and 400 names.

In the center of the chamber, on a flat stone resembling exactly the one at the entrance where Mercy had died, there was a thirteenth name scratched into the stone itself with a knife, in Prudence Yates’s hand. It was not the name of a traveler. It was the name of a member of the Yates family. It was Prudence’s own name.

And beneath the name, in the same hand, was a sentence. The sentence read: I am the last to be acquired, and I will acquire the one who comes for me, and I will live in him, and I will live in his sons, and I will not pass away. Crofts wrote that the men froze in that chamber the moment they read this. One of them, a soldier from Fremont County named Lyndon, said in a quiet voice: My God, boys, one of us is carrying her now.

No one answered Lyndon. The men looked at each other in the lantern light, each wondering which of them it was. They left the chamber, sealed the entrance with the dynamite, and walked back through the canyon in silence. No one spoke of what they had seen for the rest of the march out.

Crofts wrote that in the years that followed, the men who had been in that cave made a secret pact. Any one of them who saw in another the signs of change, any sign at all, was to come to that man and kill him without warning, burn the body, and say nothing. Crofts wrote that this pact had been carried out, to his knowledge, three times between 1904 and 1949. In each case, the man killed had begun, in the weeks before his death, to speak in his sleep in a woman’s voice, with a certain lilting cadence, and his wife or children had heard it and reported it.

Crofts wrote that he had been chosen by lot to carry out one of these killings, in 1917. The man he killed was named Beas, a common enough name in Colorado, possibly related to Harland Beas who died in 1981, possibly not. The man wept when Crofts came for him, and said in his own voice: thank you. His last words before Crofts shot him were: she is almost all that is left of me now.

Do it, Nathaniel. Do it quickly. Crofts wrote that he did it quickly. He burned the body.

He had not slept well since. He wrote that his grandson, upon reading the letter, must not seek out the canyon, must not speak the names in any public place, must never say the name Prudence alone in a dark room, and must not pass the pact to his own children, because the pact died with the last men who were in that cave, and the only safety for the Crofts family and for the families of every man who came out of that canyon was silence. Total silence, from now until the end of the Crofts line. Peter Crofts, upon reading this on his fiftieth birthday in 1988, drove to the overlook.

We know what he did there. His widow, in a 1992 interview, said only that in the summer of 1988 Peter began to talk in his sleep in a voice she did not recognize, in a language she did not understand, and that she woke one night to find him sitting up in bed in the dark, eyes open, repeating over and over: I am the last to be acquired. She asked him in the morning if he remembered it. He looked at her and did not answer.

Two weeks later, he was dead. Understand from that what you will. We claim nothing either way. We are only relaying what the widow said, what the letter said, and what the men in the canyon reported in 1904, all of which is on record for anyone who can find the remaining fragments.

What happened to the canyon after the 1904 raid? The sheriff’s expedition, after bringing out Hannah Doyle and sealing the inner chamber with dynamite, cleaned out the main living areas. The 43 Yateses were buried in a mass grave at the mouth of the canyon, in unconsecrated ground, with no markers. The 49 soldiers who died were brought out where possible and buried in cemeteries across the four counties, with headstones that did not describe how they died.

The register was taken and placed in the bank vault in Chicago. Prudence’s writings, in bundles of waxed cloth inside her personal cave, ended up with Vollmer at Yale. The wax effigies were burned. The herb troughs were burned.

The stone circles were smashed with sledgehammers. But the canyon itself could not be destroyed. It was a natural formation. The caves that had sheltered the clan for 62 years were still there.

The narrow canyon that had hidden them was still there. The flat stone at the back where Mercy died was still there. The sheriffs marked the location on their maps and notified the U. S.

Army, which in 1905 declared the entire canyon system a restricted area for reasons of public safety, with no further elaboration in its public notice. In 1911, when the preventive detention law was passed and the records sealed, the canyon’s restricted status was quietly transferred from the Army to the newly created Bureau of Land Management, which inherited the classification and has maintained it, with minor occasional boundary adjustments, for over a century. The Bureau’s current classification covers about three miles of the canyon’s length, including the mouth, the main slot, the meadow where the sentries saw the procession in 1879, and the cave system at the head where the clan lived. The classification is described in the Bureau’s current materials as a restricted cultural and biological area.

The materials do not describe what culture or what biology justifies the restriction. Public inquiries over the years have been answered with form letters citing the 1911 statute and declining further comment. A handful of people have tried to enter the canyon since 1904. In 1923, two brothers named Toller from Pueblo entered on a bet.

They never came out. A Bureau ranger two years later found their rifles propped neatly against a rock at the entrance, as though placed there by hand. The bodies were never found. In 1947, a geology professor from Boulder, denied permission to enter, went in with two graduate students.

One student came out after four days, delirious and unable to describe what had happened. The professor and the other student were never found. The surviving student spent his life in and out of asylums and died in 1981. In 1976, a Hollywood film crew scouting locations for a Western hired a small plane to fly over the canyon.

The plane went down. All three men aboard were killed. The federal safety board ruled it pilot error. The pilot’s widow said her husband had flown for 22 years and had never had an engine failure, and that he had expressed concern the night before that something about the canyon looked wrong from the air.

He had said: from the air you can see things you cannot see from the ground. He did not elaborate. The newspaper that printed the interview went out of business the following year. The journalist who conducted it died in a single-car accident in 1981.

The pattern since 1904 is that the canyon does not admit entry easily. Whether this is due to the rugged nature of the terrain, or to lingering superstition among locals, or to something else, is a question that depends on what you are prepared to believe. The author of this account claims nothing. But there is one more thing to say about the Yates family.

It is the hardest thing to say because it is the least provable, and if true, it raises questions the state of Colorado has worked hard for a long time to prevent from being asked. In the spring of 2003, a woman walked into the Pueblo County sheriff’s office to report something she said had been happening in her home for the past six months. Her teenage daughter, fifteen years old, had begun speaking at night in a voice that was not her own, with a cadence and vocabulary the daughter could not possibly have known. The voice had identified itself by name on three occasions.

The name was Prudence Yates. The deputy who took the report was Daniel Rowan. He was thirty-four. He had grown up in Pueblo.

He had never heard the name Yates in any significant context. He filed the report under domestic disturbance and told the woman someone would be in touch. He did not know that the case number would be flagged within hours by a software system installed in 1998 as part of a federal grant for records modernization, built by a technician whose paperwork later turned out to be forged, designed to flag any report containing certain keywords. The name Yates was on the list.

The name Prudence was on the list. The phrase speaking in another voice was on the list. Within 48 hours, three men Deputy Rowan had never seen before arrived at the sheriff’s office. They did not identify themselves to him.

They spoke only to the sheriff. After they left, the sheriff told Rowan that the report would be referred to state-level jurisdiction, that he was not to contact the woman, and that the case was closed. Rowan asked why. The sheriff told him that if he asked again, he would be fired.

Rowan did not ask again. But he kept a copy of the original report in a shoebox in his garage, because something about the way the sheriff’s hands shook while they spoke told him he might one day want proof that the report existed. In 2017, Rowan, retired by then, gave the shoebox to a Denver journalist researching the Yates case for a podcast that was never produced, because its funding was withdrawn under circumstances the publisher declined to clarify. The shoebox contained the original report dated April 14, 2003, filed by a woman whose name was redacted, but whose daughter was fifteen at the time and would, by the math of the years, be thirty-eight today.

We do not know what became of the daughter. We do not know whether the three men did anything. We do not know whether the voice was merely the ordinary strangeness of a troubled teenager. We claim nothing.

We only note that the alert system existed, that the three men came, that the sheriff’s hand shook, and that Rowan kept the shoebox. What remains is not a mystery that has been solved. It is a mystery that has been actively, at great cost, prevented from being solved by a chain of institutions over more than a century and a half. A Pueblo sheriff in 1866.

A territorial governor in 1879. The state of Colorado in 1904 and 1911. Yale University in 1922. The Smithsonian in 1987.

A publisher in 1976. Two more publishers in the 1980s. A software system flagging the name Yates in 2003. A funding withdrawal in 2017.

Each is individually explainable. Taken together, they form a pattern suggesting that someone decided the full story is not safe to tell. Not uncomfortable. Not embarrassing.

Not disturbing. Not safe. Why might it not be safe? What could be unsafe about telling the story of a frontier family that killed a lot of people in a canyon in the nineteenth century?

There are stories like this all over the American West. The Harpe brothers in Kentucky in the 1790s. The Bender family in Kansas in the 1870s. The Benders are in every book on American heritage you will ever read.

No one sealed the Bender records. No one flagged the name Bender in a sheriff’s software system. No one drove to an overlook and shot himself after reading an account of the Benders. The Benders are just a story.

The Yateses are something else. The difference, if we are prepared to say it aloud, lies in what the Yateses believed. The Benders killed for money. The Harpes killed because they were insane, and because the Kentucky frontier in the 1790s was a place where the insane could operate without restraint.

The Yateses killed because they believed they were gathering souls, and that gathered souls would continue, and that the final acquisition in the bone chamber would allow the originator of the system to transfer herself into a vessel that would carry her beyond the raid, beyond the century, beyond her own death, into the body of a man who came for her and into the bodies of that man’s descendants. That is a belief. It does not matter, for the purpose of what a belief does, whether that belief was true. What matters is only that the belief existed, that it was deeply held, that it was systematic, that it was enacted in ritual over nearly 200 people across six decades.

That is a long time to practice something. That is a great deal of practice. Whatever that thing is capable of doing when practiced with that much consistency, by people who believed in it that seriously, by people who shaped their entire existence around it, is a question scientific materialism does not know how to answer. It is a question most of us, if we are honest, do not know how to answer either.

We would prefer not to have to. Nathaniel Crofts knew this. He wrote in his letter that for the final sentence, where he was supposed to tell his grandson something helpful, he had thought for weeks about what to write and could not think of anything that would help. The only thing he could offer his grandson was a question, and the question was: if something like this could be done at all, by anyone, under any circumstances, what else could be done?

What else is being done? What lies in the ground, in the valleys, in the rooms with the bones, waiting for the right night and the right prayer and the right hands? He wrote that he did not know. He wrote that he had not known in all his years, and that he hoped his grandson would never need to know.

He wrote that he was sorry. He wrote that he loved him. He signed his name, Nathaniel Crofts, and put the letter in its envelope, sealed it, put it in the drawer, and waited for death, which took another 32 years, during which he never slept a full night and never spoke the name Yates aloud. The canyon still exists.

The Bureau classification still stands. The caves are still sealed, or were as of the last time anyone authorized checked, which was in 1998 during a routine aerial survey. The flat stone where Mercy Yates died, according to the testimony of the only geologist who managed to see a 1904 photograph of it in the state archive before access was permanently revoked, is still visible in modern satellite imagery if you know where to look. The narrow canyon leading to it is so narrow that a man can walk through it only single file, his shoulders brushing both walls.

The mouth of the canyon, where 211 men gathered in the dark at 2 a. m. on September 23, 1904, opens onto a meadow now overgrown with brush. The brush, according to local reports, grows tall and unusual, and unusually dense, in a particular ring around the center of the meadow.

The ring is located roughly where the survivors of the posse dug the mass grave for the 43 Yateses on the afternoon of the 23rd. The ring has moved over the years. According to one cattleman in Fremont County who has run sheep near the canyon mouth since the 1970s, the ring was in one place in 1975, in a slightly different place in 1995, and somewhere else in 2015. In other words, the ring moves.

No one has published a study of why. The soul, in Prudence Yates’s cosmology, was not located inside the body. The soul accumulated around the body and could be redirected by proper ritual into a different body, a different place, a different time. The brush growing in a moving ring at the canyon mouth is probably not evidence of anything.

The ring is probably just the ordinary movement of soil disturbance over a century. The pattern in the satellite imagery, where the dark vegetation of the ring stands out against the pale grass, is probably just a pattern. And the fact that, from a certain altitude, it resembles a particular looping letter is probably just coincidence. The letter P in Prudence Yates’s handwriting was always distinctive.

Vollmer described it in 1915 as the most memorable element of her hand. So distinctive that it served as her signature. The pattern in the brush from above resembles that letter so closely that one of the Bureau’s contractors, assigned in 2011 to review satellite imagery of restricted areas, flagged it in a memo later removed from the file. The contractor’s name is not public.

The memo is not public. The pattern is still there. Conclude from that what you will. We claim nothing.

What we will say, in conclusion, is this. In the long and ugly history of this nation’s frontier, there have been many evils. Massacres. Lynchings.

Child killings. Church burnings. The Yates clan is not the worst of these by any numerical measure. Between 74 and 240 people over 62 years does not put them even on the list of worst American atrocities.

Sand Creek killed more people in a single morning than the Yateses killed in their entire history. The frontier was not a merciful place, and the Yateses were, by precise arithmetic, a secondary horror. What makes them different is not the number. What makes them different is the intent.

The Yateses did not kill for plunder, or conquest, or terror. They killed to accumulate. They killed as practitioners and first adherents of a theology they invented themselves, and believed with a kind of absolute, generationally inherited conviction that most religions take centuries to produce. They killed because they believed they were building something that would last long after them.

And whether they succeeded, in some sense we cannot measure, acknowledge, or name, is a question the state of Colorado decided 120 years ago we would not be allowed to ask. They have their reasons. We do not know what those reasons are. We can guess.

We can suspect that someone, somewhere, in a position of quiet authority, read Nathaniel Crofts’s letter, or read Henrik Vollmer’s papers, or looked at the pattern of brush in the meadow, and decided, with the ordinary cowardice of institutional life, that this one would stay buried. It is almost buried. Not quite. It leaks out in small ways, the way history always leaks: through a shoebox in Deputy Rowan’s garage, through a deathbed letter opened by a grandson, through a drunken night of a scout in a Trinidad saloon, through the slow careful work of a historian who died suspiciously in 1981, through the pattern of brush in the meadow, through the stories of the families of the descendants of the men who came down out of that canyon in 1904 and never slept well again.

It leaks the way some things always leak, no matter how carefully they are sealed. Perhaps that is a mercy. Perhaps it is a warning. Perhaps both.

Prudence Yates, if we take her last words in the bone chamber seriously, is still here somewhere. In a body that does not know it, or in nothing at all. Perhaps those words were a lie written by a dying old woman who wanted, in her final days, to frighten the men she knew would one day come for her. Which of those is true?

A question to which we have no answer. The reader is invited to decide, in the privacy of his own beliefs, whether the answer matters. In 1866, an itinerant preacher entered a canyon to pray over a child born dead. A woman told him his mother in Ohio would know what had become of him, and that she would be proud of him.

Two years later, a letter reached the mother by post, containing a lock of hair braided into a small ring, with a note. The note was signed with an ornate P, and the lock of hair, according to the Pueblo County deputy sheriff who finally agreed to open the drawer in 1904 after 38 years, was still soft to the touch. It had not aged. It had never dried.

The deputy said it carried a faint scent, like the watercourse behind the canyon where the washing was done. The lock of hair was removed from the drawer and, on the sheriff’s orders, placed in a small iron box, and the box was buried in an unmarked spot in the yard behind the sheriff’s office. That spot is probably still there. The years passed.

The yard was paved over. There is now a parking lot where the sheriff’s office stood. The parking lot adjoins a county government complex. The complex opens to the public during business hours.

The lot has about 80 spaces. There is no distinguishing mark between them. None is special. The lock of hair, if it is still in the ground, is beneath one of them.

The lock of hair, if it is still in the ground, is still soft to the touch. The lock of hair, if it is still in the ground, still smells of the watercourse. Prudence Yates believed that the soul was something that accumulated around the body and could be directed by ritual into another body, another place, another time. A lock of hair in the right place underground, under the right conditions, with the right accumulated weight behind it, is an anchor.

The lock of hair is an anchor. The canyon is an anchor. The pattern of brush in the meadow is an anchor. The locked drawer at the Smithsonian is an anchor.

The bank vault in Chicago is an anchor. The three men who came to the Pueblo sheriff’s office in April 2003 are, in their quiet way, anchors. There are anchors all over this country if you know how to see them. They do not all belong to the Yateses.

The Yateses are one line. There are other lines. There are, if we are honest with ourselves, more than we would like to think about. But that is a story for another night.

The Yates family is still out there, in some form or another. And so are the rest of them.