What if a man had just enough grain to keep himself alive through the hardest winter in 20 years, and he gave every last handful of it away to strangers his neighbors would have let die in the snow? What if that man stood in his storehouse on a December night with the wind screaming outside, looked at the sacks of grain that were the only thing standing between him and starvation, and made a choice that his whole community told him was dangerous and probably fatal? What if he said only this, his breath fogging in the lantern light? A man does not ask a starving child where his father comes from. In the winter of 1879, the high country of the Colorado territory stood at the edge of two very different worlds, each one watching the other across a valley that might as well have been an ocean for all the trust that flowed between them.
On one side lay the scattered ranches and mining camps of the white settlers, men and women who had staked their claims in a hard country and meant to hold them against weather, wolves, and anyone else who might have other ideas about who the land belonged to. They had come west with wagons and Bibles and rifles, and they had built their houses with logs they cut themselves, and their barns with planks they hauled up from the mills in Denver. They had buried their dead in graveyards where the stones leaned into the wind like old men too tired to stand straight, and they remembered every name carved into those stones. On the other side, moving quieter than the wind through the pines, and knowing every trail and water source in a 100 miles, were the bands of the Apache, who had called this land home long before the first surveyor drove a stake into the frozen earth. They were a proud people, a warrior people, and they had not asked for the treaties that pushed them from valley to valley or the soldiers who enforced those treaties with rifle and cannon.
They remembered what had been taken from them, and they remembered the faces of those who had taken it. It was a hard land where respect had to be earned, and grudges ran as deep as the mountain snow. The settlers remembered raids from years past, cabins burned in the night, stock runoff and never recovered, graves dug in stony ground where no one had planned to die young. The Apache remembered broken treaties and stolen children and promises that melted faster than spring snow in the high meadows. Trust was a word neither side used easily.
And the valley that lay between them was filled with ghosts that neither side could see, but both sides could feel every time the wind came down cold from the peaks. The town of Redcliffe sat at the bottom of a narrow canyon, where two creeks joined before running down to the plains below. Cold, clear water cutting through rock that had been there since before any man walked the earth. It was not much of a town, if truth be told, just a general store with a porch that creaked under the weight of barrels stacked along its front. A blacksmith whose forge sent smoke and sparks into the gray winter sky, a church that doubled as a schoolhouse, and a scattering of cabins that leaned into the wind like tired old men who had given up on standing straight.