Deep Creek

by Pam Houston

  Late: John R. Pinckley was found on Monday at Locklin’s ranch. When seen by the caretaker there, he was walking near the house, with a gag in his mouth and his hands bound in front of him with baling wire. When the gag was released, he said that he had been held up and robbed by some men who took $25.00, and his chewing tobacco. Pinckley, being an inveterate user of tobacco, it can readily be seen what an awful act was committed by the robbers. After robbing him the men then kidnapped him, ran off with him, all same Albanian brigands and Ellen Stone.3

  He returned to town the same day and at once bought some more tobacco, but will not open his face about his being kidnapped. There must be a dark and bloody mystery somewhere, and we recommend that Sheriff Duncan at once obtain the services of Old Sleuth, the famous detective, in order to have the whole thing fathomed out.

  May 21, 1910

  Vol. XIX

  The County Court

  Before Judge C.Y. Butler sitting in the May term of the County court, counsel for John R. Pinckley filed a motion asking for the setting aside of the verdict of the jury in the divorce suit of Mrs. Pinckley, in which she was granted a decree. The motion was overruled and counsel then took exception to the overruling and made a motion for a new trial. Judge Butler thereupon set the case for trial on Monday June 6th.

  June 21, 1913

  Vol. XXII

  Creede

  John R. Pinckley, an old time ranchman of Antelope Park, died at his home on Friday of last week, June 14. Mr. Pinckley was born in Carroll County, Tennessee, and was 52 years of age. He is survived by five children, Mrs. Don LaFont, Robert Pinckley, Hazel Pinckley and two twin girls, May and Fay, adopted by Mr. A.D. Parsons of Creede.4

  The funeral services were conducted by the Rev. J. Bruce Mather, pastor for the Congregational church of Creede, and were held at the home of the deceased. Mr. Pinckley was buried on the home ranch. A large number of neighbors and friends attended the funeral.

  May 27, 1916

  Vol. XXV

  The County Court

  Creede Colorado will take notice that on Monday, June 19th, A.D. 1916, the hearing upon the final accounts and settlements of the following named estates respectively will be had and made, viz: No. 114 Estate of John R. Pinckley, deceased: Don C. LaFont, administrator, PO Creede, Colorado. Hearing and final settlement on Monday, June 19th, 1916, at 10 o’clock am. And Further Notice is Hereby Given, that at said time and place the Court will receive and hear pro 9 f’s concerning the heirs of said deceased persons pursuant to the verified petitions of Don C. LaFont . . . administrators of said estates and will judicially ascertain and determine the heirs of said decedent, it being alleged in said petition of Don C. LaFont that Mrs. Don C. LaFont, Joseph Robert Pinckley, Hazel H. Pinckley, children are the only heirs at law of said estate.

  Now therefore any and all persons who are or who claim to be heirs at law of . . . said decedents are hereby required to . . . appear thereat, or abide the determination of the Court thereon. Given under my hand and the seal of said court at City of Creede, Co, in said County this 24th day of May A.D. 1916

  As tempting as it is to spend the rest of my summer reading every single issue of The Creede Candle, I decide to ask a few living people to tell me what they can about the history of the ranch.

  “It was John LaFont who fenced the ranch,” Dona Blair tells me over eggs and coffee at MJ’s Café in Creede, “but not until after we bought it. He made his living doing fences for people—he was the best fencer in the whole valley at the time.”

  Dona is a kind of human spark plug, optimistic, intelligent, and energetic. Just when you think you have her pegged as a nice Texan lady with a summer house in the mountains, she’ll let it drop into the conversation that she just came back from a six-week stint doing NGO work in Yemen.

  “My husband and I would give each other a quarter mile of fencing ever year for Christmas for a decade,” she says. “We would buy the barbed wire and the posts and John would come out and put it in.”

  “He did a damned good job,” I tell her. “That fence is in good shape almost fifty years later.”

  “Pinckley had it fenced too, but not so as it would hold anything,” she says. “Bob was a tiny little fellow, never in that good of health.” She reaches her hand across the table to touch mine and lowers her voice. “They took him in World War II, you know, and they never should have taken him. He didn’t have the spirit for it. I don’t believe he ever recovered.” She takes her hand back and butters an English muffin. “Bob walked all bent over, you know, from the waist, almost at a forty-five-degree angle. When we started staying in the cabin and even I had to duck to get in there I thought, Oh, this must be why.”

  When Dona and her then husband, Robert Blair, bought the ranch it consisted of the small barn down at the end of the driveway, which was in ruins by the time I bought it, the big barn, Bob Pinckley’s cabin and at least fifteen outhouses.

  “Pinckley collected them,” Dona says. “As the guest ranches around the valley modernized, they would give him the outhouses. He would put them on a horse wagon and drag them down here; he would whittle kindling all winter and store it in the outhouses. He kept balls of string and stores of tin foil. He was a pack rat.”

  Dona and Robert kept one outhouse on the place in honor of Bob, and it stands behind the chicken coop to this day.

  “Bob didn’t care for people all that much,” Dona says, “but he sure loved his horses. When you go home, see if you can see their names and the day they died, scratched into the wood on that big window’s frame.”

  Sure enough, they are exactly where she said they would be, faint, but still legible: Daisy: 11.14.41, Maisey: 1.6.55, Star: 10.10.60.

  Everyone in Creede knows who Bob Pinckley was, but he was a hermit and died nearly sixty years ago, so it’s not easy to find people who actually knew him. I run into Tom Payne leaving the bank one day. Tom was born and raised here, and has lived here all his life. I’d been told Tom’s father owned a sawmill up on Ivy Creek, above the ranch, and when Tom went up to help his dad mill, they’d always take a six-pack of beer and a carton of cigarettes to Bob.

  Tom agrees to my request to talk about Bob sometime, but Tom is shy, and would rather be in the mountains on his horse than talk to anybody, so it takes a few phone calls and eventually the intervention of his wife, Patti, our county treasurer, to make the meeting actually happen.

  The six coonhounds who live in Tom’s yard greet me first, and then Tom, himself, dressed all in camouflage. He asks me in and pushes three winter sleeping bags with impressive loft off a black leather sofa so I can sit down. Tom manages to make the task of stuffing those giant bags back into their compression sacks last most of the thirty minutes we are speaking. Ten beautifully tanned coyote hides hang from a coat rack next to an equally beautiful beaver. Photos of elk, moose and bears don the walls.

  Tom worked in the silver mines in Creede for years and was the Single Jack Mining World Champion in 1983. This means that, in an allotted amount of time, Tom, wielding a four-pound hammer, was able to drive a chisel-pointed steel into solid rock by striking it with the hammer, rotating the chisel ninety degrees each time before striking it again—better, faster and deeper than anybody else. The single jack is the pièce de résistance of the yearly Hard Rock Mining Competition that takes place in Creede and other mountain mining towns, and the best hand steelers will hit the chisel sixty to seventy times per minute, the speed increasing not only the depth of the hole in the rock, but the probability an ill-placed strike will destroy the driller’s hand. Also in 1983, Tom—known in competitions as the Trapper—edged out all twenty-eight state champions to win the coveted Colorado All-Around Miner Trophy.

  We make Creede’s version of small talk for about ten minutes. How cold did it get at my house last night? (21 degrees.) How many bales of hay did I have in the barn? (220.) How many sheep had I lost last winter? (Only one, a yearling ram named Lance who died of pneumonia right after shearing. I was worrie
d about a ewe named L.C. who must have gotten into a poison weed this week, but she seemed to be recovering slowly.) How many moose had I seen that summer? (A cow and a calf a couple of different times up Shallow Creek, a good-sized bull just below Love Lake and a young bull running straight across my pasture in that gorgeous loose-limbed way they have, heading for the hills the day before the start of moose season.)

  I ask Tom about the sawmill days, specifically, what Pinckley and his dad talked about in the cabin over beers.

  “Oh, you know,” he says, “about how much snow they used to get in the old days, and how many elk there used to be in the old days, and how easy it was to trap bobcat in the old days.” He grins. “Of course those days are the old days now.”

  “I heard a story,” I say, “about Pinckley shooting a hole in his side and you stuffing the wound with flour.”

  Tom laughs out loud. “Well, first of all, it was a knife,” he says, “and it wasn’t me who stuffed the flour.” He lifts his eyes from the sleeping bag and grins again. “Would you like to hear the real story?”

  I nod.

  “It was a big old buck knife Bob wore sticking out of his pants in the back,” Tom says. “Most of any given day he’d be sitting out there in the cabin, looking out the long rectangular window that looks right up to the high park above the road to Spar City. He’d see an elk up there, and if he was out of meat he’d go up there and poach it. He didn’t care too much about hunting season. He’d just go up there and get it. Sometimes he had a horse, and sometimes he’d go on foot.” We’ve hit upon something Tom likes to talk about and it is as if the very walls of the room relax. “Well, this day he went up on foot and shot the elk, but it was too cold to butcher it up there so he slung the whole thing around his neck to carry it home. It couldn’t have been a very big elk—I mean a big elk could weigh more than a thousand pounds, and he was a little guy, you know? He walked all bent over. Anyhow, he had that elk on his shoulders, trying to carry it home, and he must have stumbled somehow and came down on that big knife.”

  “Ouch,” I offer.

  “What was lucky is that John LaFont had gone out to the ranch looking for him that day—John looked after him more and more as he got older—and found him up there just about bled out. It was John who had the wherewithal to pack that wound full of flour—why John had flour on him that day was anybody’s guess—but he packed that flour in there to stop the bleeding, and got him back home so he could get patched up.”

  “Did he go to the doctor?”

  “I imagine he did,” Tom says, “though it wasn’t his favorite thing.” He shakes his head and lets go a little chuckle. “You hear the story about the bobcat?”

  I have not.

  “Well, this other time,” Tom says, “Pinckley was riding a green broke horse way up Red Mountain Creek somewhere looking for bobcat. And he’d gotten one, shot it in the nose with a .22 and tried to strangle it.”

  “He did what, now?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Tom says, letting the sleeping bag drop near his feet so he can talk with his hands, “that’s what those guys did. They’d whap the thing hard on the nose with a little .22 bullet, or sometimes even a stick just to knock the cat out. And then they’d strangle it. The hide would fetch more money if it didn’t have a bullet hole in it. So he hit this cat in the nose with a .22, and then strangled it, and tied it onto his saddle. He’s coming down the mountain, talking a little bit to this green horse he’s only ridden a handful of times, trying to keep everything nice and calm, you know? And he turns to look behind him and dammed if that cat hasn’t come back to life. That cat’s just riding along, with his head bobbing, eyes wide open, taking in the view. The cat’s front paws are hanging right over the horse’s flank, and Bob knows its only a matter of time until it comes wide awake and digs its claws into that young horse. So Bob very very carefully reaches around with his rifle—he has to hold it way out to the side you know, and he shoots that cat in the back of the head. The horse throws Bob, of course, and goes tearing down the mountain with the dead cat still strapped on. Bob had to walk all the way home, and when he got there, there was his horse standing right next to the cabin, that dead cat still strapped onto the saddle.”

  The look in Tom’s eye is half amusement, half unadulterated sorrow that the old days are gone.

  “Pinckley’d shoot rabbits out the window of that cabin.” Tom says, “We’d be sitting there talking and he’d lay his rifle right across the sill and shoot. One day his hand slipped and he shot a hole right through his own table. I remember we brought him some plastic glue and he fixed it. He was so impressed with that plastic glue.” Tom shakes his head and some bigger emotion crosses his face and stalls him out for a minute.

  “Other people in town I’ve talked to have said he was an old grouch, that he didn’t like people very much,” I say.

  “I don’t really think that’s true,” Tom says, “I just don’t think he liked to go to town all that much.” Tom’s eyes go toward the window. “And really, who could blame him?”

  I couldn’t blame him. I hardly ever go to town.

  “He liked to sit right at the window,” Tom says again, “looking up to the high meadow and waiting for something to walk across it.”

  I admit to Tom that especially in wintertime, I like to sit at the window and look up there myself.

  There is nothing shy about Carl Vavak, the only other Creede resident I can find left alive who hung out with Bob. I offer to buy him and his long-distance girlfriend, Lynn, green chili cheeseburgers and fried sweet potato spirals at MJ’s in exchange for information.

  The first thing Carl tells me is that he wound up with Bob Pinckley’s still.

  “Bob was making whiskey up there?”

  “During prohibition just about everybody was. There were at least twenty major stills in this county.”

  Born and raised between Creede and Pagosa Springs, Carl worked the silver mines until they closed in 1983. He tells me three things about Pinckley no one else has mentioned. That he was quite happy standing up to his neck in horseshit, but if he got the tiniest bit of cow shit on him he would fuss and scrape for an hour. That he never owned a car, but that in February of each year he would get someone to drive him into town. He would check himself into the Creede Hotel and drink and carouse for two weeks straight. Then somebody would drive him back out to the ranch and that was it for another year. And also once a year, he would make a list of clothes he needed and John LaFont would go down to the JC Penney’s in Alamosa and buy everything on the list, but when Bob died and the relatives came to clean out the cabin, all of those shirts and pants John had bought were folded neatly in the corner with the tags still on.

  “And mourning doves,” Carl says. “He could not abide the sound of a mourning dove.”

  “Maybe they made him sad,” Lynn offers.

  “Maybe,” Carl says, and takes another bite of his cheeseburger.

  I ask Carl if he thinks the killing Bob saw in World War II turned him into a hermit, and he considers the question for a moment and says, “What I always heard is he just couldn’t take the discipline. He wasn’t a guy who had ever taken orders. Those kids grew up wild on the ranch and Bob never had to answer to anybody. They put him on KP duty, cause he wasn’t any good as a soldier, and no sooner had they done that he stood up into one of those cast iron pots and knocked himself out—worked himself a medical discharge.”

  As Pinckley got older, Carl’s dad would drive out to the ranch and get him, and bring him to their home on Miners Creek (about halfway to town) for marathon rounds of a card game called sluff.

  “It sounds like a lot of people in town looked after him,” I say.

  “I’d say that’s true. John LaFont most of all. He would ice fish for him up in Spar City. Different people would bring him vegetables sometimes. I don’t think he ate very well. Might have been diabetic. He had a temper for sure. I was only fourteen when he died, but all us kids knew to be a little careful
around him. He was caged dynamite a lot of the time and we didn’t want to get a cussin’. He took kind of a liking to me, though. He had a telescope—a good one for the time—and he gave it to me before he died. I don’t think he used it to do anything but hunt for animals, but he sparked a love of astronomy in me I’ve carried all my life.”

  “That might be the single most positive thing I’ve heard anybody say about Bob Pinckley,” I tell Carl.

  “He had a hard life,” Carl says. “Everybody talks about the good old days. . . .” He shakes his head. “LaFont told me that one time back in the early days the Pinckley family needed money so bad they hired out Bob to go on up to Wright’s ranch”—about twelve miles upriver—“to drive a team. They were plowing, and building some cabins. So Bob went up there and put in a couple of sixteen-hour days, but pretty soon they had to send him home because he was too homesick. How old do you think he was?”

  I shake my head.

  “Seven,” Carl says. “Let that sink in.”

  2 Maude May Pinckley was John Robert’s second wife and, briefly, the stepmother of Bob, Myrtle, Ada and Hazel. The child named here is James Pinckley, who would eventually die in a snow slide up Red Mountain Creek.

  3 Ellen Stone was an American missionary who on September 3, 1901, was captured in the Ottoman Balkans by members of a Macedonian revolutionary organization seeking independence from the Ottomans. The Macedonians demanded $110,000 in ransom and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions refused to pay. In early October, Stone’s relatives and a Boston ministry began a public campaign to raise the money, but before they did, C. M. Dickinson, an American diplomat in Bulgaria convinced the bandits to accept a smaller amount and Miss Stone was released.