PICKETWIRE
Professor of History and Anthropology
University of California, Santa Barbara
Spaniards called it the Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio. The French, le
Rivière Purgatoir, Americans, the Picketwire. This piece is one writer’s meditation
on moral uncertainty and lack of endings in so much of the past. Muache Ute and
Jicarilla Apache bison hunters, Spanish soldados, French fur trappers, American
traders, Slavic coal miners, and Confederados all lived and died on the
Picketwire. And their stories whisper there, still.