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Show 3. Our town was named after one of the first Europeans to see the place, Friar Silvestre Velez de Escalante, who with his companion Friar Francisco Atansio Dominguez walked through that part of the country in 1776, about 120 years before it became a town, looking for a way from Santa Fe to California. At that time it was a wintering place of the Ute Indians, later T4tV it became a rendezvous for trappers and buyers, later yet a town. I didn't know the history. The Indians were long since penned up on a reservation and the people with Spanish names lived mostly on the wrong side of the tracks. I didn't even know that an outsider would see Escalante as small, flat and dusty, a typical western town surrounded by farmers, sheepmen and cattle ranchers. Middle class businessmen ran the town; the westerners, who are not middle class, ignored them. The people I thought were rich were only comfortable, and the poor were everywhere. Only Main Street was paved. Across the tracks where the Mexicans lived in adobe houses the streets, unlike my part of town, were not graveled and rarely graded and never water-sprayed to lay the dust. Not much of a place, except it sits on the banks of the Uncompahgre River and on the broad floor of the Uncompahgre Valley, looking north to Grand Mesa, east to Red Rocks, west to the Uncompahgre Plateau, called Horsefly, and south to the towering peaks of the San Juans, to Mt. Sneffles over 14,000 feet high. Growing up in the dust, all I had to do was lift my eyes to see from twenty to sixty miles, depending on how far away the mountains, through air as clear as we all remember it, across green trees to blue mountains. |
