I’ve been reading A Bridge to Yesterday by Emma Riggenbach. This book is a history of my town, Monte Vista, Colorado. One of the soul-stirring items is the description of one of the early residents, a woman who drove a surrey “with the fringe on top.” The book is fascinating for a very limited audience. It has newspaper clippings, photos, minutes from early city council meetings, all very interesting if you happen to live here and are interested in that sort of thing.
The “old west” was not — now I know — all that long ago. Monte Vista, as the author of this book describes, saw a lot of fist-fights, but no gun fights though, as she writes, there was a mass murder. To make a long story short, a man got up early one morning, grabbed his rifle, and took off across the country on foot. He killed four of his neighbors and then himself. Riggenbach writes, “Five lives were snuffed out, the happiness of five homes broken up, two women widowed and six minor children orphaned.” No motive was ever discovered and the conclusion was that Mr. Bailey, the killer, had just lost his mind.
This was never a really “wild-and-woolly” place like a lot of “Wild West” towns were, but Monte Vista wasn’t a mining town, either, where passions run high. It had a train running through it — as a lot of American towns had back in the day — schools, churches, banks, two movie theaters, two news papers and even an opera house. My impression from the book is that from the beginning, Monte Vista just wanted to be a nice place for people to live. Many of the early traditions have endured and others have fallen away. The founder had visions of grandeur that never came true, but I think — if they saw their town now — they might be OK with that.
The featured photo is from A Bridge to Yesterday. What’s interesting about it is that building is still a real estate office.
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