At the present time I am reading a book entitled A GOOD LIFE From Skipout Creek to Poverty Valley, by Alice Maud Kroeger, written in 1973. Alice's son and grandson and their families live not too far east of here. The following is an incident that she wrote about which happened in 1912. At that time the family was living in Crestone, Colorado on the western edge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
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One spring day in early May, the children who were on the playground at the schoolhouse noticed a poor skinny horse coming out from a nearby path which led up into the higher mountains. The teacher's attention was called to the animal because of the terrible stench coming from it. It seemed to have a bundle of some sort under its belly, too. The townspeople gathered, and it was determined that the horse was owned by a prospector who had spent the winter in town; but about a month before this, had started up to his cabin and his claim.
Prospectors were known to spend most of the bad snowy months in town and when the snows started to melt in the spring, they were grub-staked by the local grocer or anyone who thought there was a chance for a share in a gold mine. So this fellow had saddled his horse, loaded his pack mule with the supplies, and headed for his cabin, hoping that if he got in early, he might find some nuggets in the gravel and sand brought down by the slides of the spring or the rush of the melting snow water. He had left town the month before his horse returned.
On careful examination the men found that somewhere along the way, and for some reason, the saddle had turned and was hanging under the horse's belly. The cinch, with the weight of the saddle and the pull of the underbrush the horse had gone through, had worked down deep into the horse's spine bones. The saddle itself was ragged and warped. One could only guess how long it had hung that way.
A posse was formed to go up the trail to the cabin to see if there was a tragedy up there or if the horse had broken loose or what. Following the path upward, they found the trail covered with snow in places and knew that the horse had either come down some other way, or had come down before the last snow. Snows often come late in the mountains.
When the men finally reached the cabin, they found that the man had never reached there, as there were no supplies in the place. Searchers combed the territory, and found the pack mule some distance away with the pack still on his back although much the worse for wear. Realizing that something had happened before the man had gone too far, the search centered along either side of the trail about halfway up to the cabin. After several tries and as the snows melted out of the sheltered places, they finally came upon the body of the man; the body was well preserved showing that it must have been under the snow.
By putting the findings together and because they found that the man had a broken thigh, they decided he had either fallen from the horse when the saddle turned, or been thrown from the horse when the animal became frightened and had hit a rock and broken his thigh. Therefore, he could neither walk nor catch the horse. His coat was in a heap beside him, and some thought he had tried to frighten the horse so it would go back to town; thus help would come. He must have been alive and crawled in the shelter of a large rock, as the evidence showed he had smoked cigarettes. He had died either from exposure when he passed out, or from shock and pain from the leg. There had been several snows in the mountains since he had left, and he had died before the last snow storm. He was given proper burial by the townspeople, and the kids learned another lesson or two about being in the mountains.
