I live at the base of the Rocky Mountain foothills in Larimer County, Colorado. Our three acres, “ceded by treaty,” were part of a larger 160-acre plot “purchased” from the Arapahoe and Cheyenne for 86 cents.

Because rattlesnakes hide in the tall grass, I mow much of our property several times a year. One spring my husband and I set out to remove protruding rocks in hopes of saving the mower’s blade. As we dug, we realized if we combine our surnames—Hadfield, from Old English heathland, field, pasture, open country; and Steensen, from the Dutch steen, stone, son of stone—we would arrive at Fieldsen, “son of field,” or “Steenfield,” “field of stone.”

We quit digging, and we now replace the mower’s blade every year.

Ansel Watrous, the reluctant author of History of Larimer County, Colorado, published in 1911, claims there are “two legitimate ways of writing history. One is to make a plain, simple statement of fact; the other to clothe the statement in language fitted to appeal to the reader’s imagination.” Rushed to write his history before all the pioneers of the region died off, he chose the former, but invited “him who writes the next history of Larimer County to enlarge upon the theme and clothe the facts in literary raiment.”

The facts, though, are ghosts and ghosts don’t wear clothes.

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Two miles from my house, on a hill overlooking the foothills to the west and the valley to the east, there is a settlers’ cemetery. Possibly an earlier indigenous burial ground, the cemetery holds the remains of white colonists, French-Canadian trappers, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mexican nationals, along with many of their multiracial offspring.

The graves of Bazille and Mary Provost, children of French Trapper John Provost, a “squaw man,” and his wife White Owl, are the oldest marked graves in Larimer County.

John “purchased” White Owl from her brother when she was sixteen, renaming her Mary, after his own mother.