I was in third grade or thereabouts when the U.S. Government decided to flood the Green River valley.
We called it the Seeds-ke-Dee, like the trappers and traders before us, explorers and Native Americans who had inhabited the land or passed through it, leaving trails and petroglyphs, and occasionally their signature carved on a hill.
Once it was verdant ranch land, green against the cliffs, cattle grazing, herds of antelope, the white frame houses crisp against late summer grass, and in one seeming instant it was the bottom of a lake, a lake that man had created, a reservoir. Fontenelle. Named for a French trader, and the river that emptied into the Green.
Our highway was moved along with the ranch houses as water filled in, water for recreation, water for irrigation, stocked with fish, there for game, the ranches gone, underwater, the memories at the bottom of a government project.
If you pass this way, pass a thought for the trappers and traders who went before, the pioneers, those who came and those who ventured onward, the primitive hunters who found the climate too harsh to stay, the modern ones who've made an uneasy peace with it, lovers of the land who know that the water is precious, the Green as it finds its birth high in the Wind Rivers and eventually wanders to the Colorado, where together they run hand in arm, lovers entwined, to the sea.
Key: Green River valley south of La Barge, Wyoming, at the north of Fontenelle, the Seeds-ke-Dee; overlooking the river at La Barge; Jim Bridger leaves his calling card behind at Names Hill, where the river was crossed by those heading west; signage at Names Hill; the trail westward.
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Ted Frier
Cleverley
J. P. Major
ohsillyme
Lauren B. Davis
Rochelle Skaar
Salon.com
Comments
last paragraph of yours, there, ought to be
engraved on a stone marker!
"If you pass this way, pass a thought ..."
just gorgeous.
Beautifully written.