Escalante Canyon is a red-walled hole in a geologic uplift (the Uncompahgre Plateau) in western Colorado. Pioneers surging west fell into this canyon hole the way gold nuggets get caught in the potholes of a stream. Like nuggets eddying against stone, they were shaped by the Canyon—rounded off, shattered, or tossed away, according to how they conformed or resisted. Indeed, treasure richer than gold settled into that hole in time; in the onrushing current of history the lifestyle—the Old West—settled and still survives there—in fact, in artifact, and in living memories.

The tale of the canyon is a tale of struggle, change, frontier friendship, and enmity that is part of the story of the West itself: Anglo settlement; conflict between cowman, nester, and sheep man; epidemics; hardships; loneliness. Many of its stories, though, are tantalizing episodes unique to this place, laced with oddity and tragedy.

Using as digging tools the camera, tape recorder, diaries, memoirs, and a hundred years of old newspapers, Marshall has mined more gold than the first prospectors ever suspected lay in that mysterious red hole.

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